Perfume Genius/Photo: Perfume Genius
Five years after the release of “Set My Heart on Fire Immediately” (2020), Michael Hadreas (Perfume Genius) is back on tour behind “Glory,” released March 28 this year. It’s been a long hiatus from the pensive indie rocker, with “Glory” representing his most recent traditional studio album as a solo artist. In the interim, Hadreas released a fascinating song-and-dance collaboration with Kate Wallich’s piece “The Sun Still Burns Here,” which led to the studio release of its musical accompaniment, “Ugly Season” (2022). But his latest work shifts from conceptual to common. “Ugly Season” is high art. “Glory” is balladic simplicity.
The former Pitchfork favorite brings the album to The Vic Theatre on June 17. For longtime fans, the record feels mature and stately, carried by an undercurrent of accessible but calculated lucidity and familiarity. It’s more approachable art than “Set My Heart on Fire Immediately” or “Ugly Season.” Stylistically, it’s closer to “Too Bright” (2014), though it still offers a new category in Hadreas’ catalog. Previous Perfume Genius music—while regularly incorporating keys—has leaned more synthetic, dramatic and electronic. This record feels like it was written on piano.
The eccentricities have moved to the background, and Hadreas’ soul has moved to the foreground. The central conflict in the album is tender and chaotic—a reflection on musical stardom and the paranoias and anxieties that status proliferates. Scenes of domestic dread and intimate apprehension in tracks like “In a Row” and “It’s a Mirror” are juxtaposed with delicately hopeful aspirations of human connection in “Full On” and “Me and Angel.” A heart in conflict with itself beats throughout the record, and it reaches no resolution. It’s an exposition in the acceptance of the banal, the melancholic and the hopeful. It’s fitting that the now-forty-three-year-old Hadreas crafted the album as a more acoustic, hushed and unresolved record, as opposed to the decadent, verdant bursts familiar to his earlier work.
For me, it’s his best work. It’s mature, lyrically sophisticated and complex—both aesthetically and emotionally honest to a painful point. It represents flexibility from the sonically ambitious tradition he’s established. Most of Perfume Genius’ work lives in Dante’s eighth circle of Paradiso. “Glory” sits in the second or third circle—still ethereal, but more terrestrial, earthy and closer to Pandemonium. There’s been some mild criticism leveled at his departure from colossal, inventive soundscapes, but the dexterity to create something in which his creativity is illustrated more subtly and lyrically marks an artistic elevation that’s worth admiring. The eccentric has been exchanged for the eloquent, and rounds of his collective discography as a more complete artistic anthology.
Perfume Genius plays The Vic Theatre, 3145 North Sheffield, with urika’s bedroom on Tuesday, June 17. Doors at 6:30pm, show at 7:30pm. Tickets start at $47 before fees, available at jamusa.com.
