In our latest Digital Cover Story, Mike Hadreas talks about accepting death, the intimacy of counterbalance, art mirroring queerness, getting braver in the studio, working with Aldous Harding, and the full-band collaboration powering his seventh Perfume Genius album, Glory.
Hearing PJ Harvey’s “The Dancer” for the first time, I knew “He said, laugh a while, I can make your heart feel” would remain within me. There’s a moment like that on Glory—the new Perfume Genius album—too, when Mike Hadreas sings, “Time, it makes a clean heart when you’re miles away from it all and the dream is gone.” The cord that binds To Bring You My Love and Glory is an unintentional one, but it’s not lost on me that, while doing press for Set My Heart on Fire Immediately in 2020, Hadreas told Vulture that Polly Jean had been a great influence on those songs—specifically, it was her 1995 opus, which he wrote scandalized and empowered him. “I love just seasoning the air with something darker and nastier,” he said, “and I like just staying there for a while.”
And it’s not lost on me that today, thanks to lingering jetlag, a case of norovirus and our paralleled cross-country and intercontinental traveling, my conversation with Hadreas is happening on February 27th, the date commemorating To Bring You My Love’s 30th birthday. I mention the coincidence to him. “When you’re young, albums change that whole time for you—how you look at everything, how you’re operating,” he replies. “I think [To Bring You My Love] still does that for me but less, especially now that I do it myself.”
The first Perfume Genius album, Learning, came out in 2010. I didn’t hear Hadreas’ music until 2012, when he made Put Your Back N 2 It, and I didn’t fully understand that I was queer until after he released Too Bright two years later. But it was in 2017, during the first bloom of May, that I came out for the first time, in the rattling hours of my second college semester, mere days after Hadreas sang “They’ll never break the shape we take” to me and so many others. What he says about To Bring You My Love—about the albums you love when you’re young—my goodness, if that’s not Perfume Genius’s catalog for me. And, hey, maybe it’s that for you, too. As Aldous Harding wrote on Instagram last month: “So wretched I did need him from the moment I heard him.”
But I’m not in college anymore, no longer surrounded by people three or four years my senior showing me how to live a non-binary life just by inviting me into their conversations. The first part of your life is undoubtedly hard, but it’s also beautifully easy. A song like “Dreeem” taught me that, when Hadreas sang “You were there, you still knew my name, and you still held me exactly the same way” into the air of a piano melody. When you are young, there are people and there is art ready to guide you into the next chapter of yourself, even if it takes a small lifetime to find them. I’m closing in on 30, and I’m having to figure out how to live through what I remember. My sexuality and gender are growing stranger and more disgusting, but the language for it is rarely new.
Hadreas, now 43, is craving examples of what he could be less, instead yearning for a mirror to how he is. “I think I just want to feel good. I want to feel happy. I want to feel excited. I want to cry. I want to feel everything as it is, but not because I figured it out—or because I finally fit into something that I’ve always been trying to, or think that I’m supposed to,” he tells me, before pausing. Chuckling, he continues: “I’m gay, you know?” We both laugh. “I’ve heard rumors about this,” I say. He replies, “When I was four, they were like, ‘You’re gay.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, what is that?’ And then I researched it and I was like, ‘Oh, I guess, yeah, I’m gay.’ I did that for a very long time, and I am still doing it, but I wonder what I would have thought about everything if nobody told me.” It’s refreshing to hear Hadreas talk about existing in coming-of-age’s afterword.
What Glory is, at least in the queer canon, is a picture of Hadreas no longer “trying to be a gay man.” “There’s parts of [being a gay man] that I like, and there’s parts that I’ve definitely figured out,” he continues, “but when I stopped trying to figure that out, I felt less like one—in a way that feels more like me. It allowed me to think, ‘Well, if I’m not a gay man, what else is there?’” What he found was expansiveness, and an identity that is simultaneously curated, intentional and unchangeable. “I don’t know when I stopped trying to figure it all out—in some ways, it made it more confusing. I feel like I’m thinking a lot more about all of this stuff. Weirdly, even though I’ve written five albums about it, I feel like I’m thinking about it more now, but in a way that doesn’t feel so EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY! Who are you??? It feels more like, ‘Well, let’s think about this.’”
Glory is 11 feelings with 10 ideas inside each of them. Hadreas takes a generous but mathematical approach to his songwriting, identifying what place he needs to zoom out from just so he can access the exact thing he’s trying to share with everyone else. “It starts with a soup of stuff, and then I have to portion it out and make counterbalance and choreography,” he explains. “I don’t know if it’s coming purely from a directly confessional thing. It feels like it’s just for me.” Hadreas doesn’t listen to his recordings very often, but he has a close relationship to his demos, especially the ones that never become Perfume Genius songs. “I don’t need to write the whole screenplay. It could just be five words, but I know the whole screenplay inside me. I get a feeling from it when I’m listening to it. I don’t have to finish it.”
The Glory title track is only 12 words long (a formula not uncommon for a Perfume Genius song). There’s a phrase within it—“guest of body”—that stuck with me after my first listen. Hadreas says that, when he wrote the song, he was thinking about the soul “before, during and after you’re alive.” Death has been on his mind, especially since the COVID pandemic. “I really know I’m gonna die,” he admits. “It’s not an idea to me anymore. And I feel like [my partner] Alan [Wyffels] is gonna die, my mom is gonna die—in a way that is very new. I know it’s, at some point, gonna happen, but surely not soon, or now, or all of a sudden. But that’s been really hard for me to process.” Hadreas feels tender about “Glory,” and he considers it to be, really, about our spirits being shepherded to the “next place,” saying, “I’m trying to be sweet about the whole thing, not so protective. I can still have love and sweetness when it’s not in the body. [I’m] trying to think that way about everything, instead of being so paranoid all the time about an accident or a global event.”
“Left For Tomorrow” is full of worry, inspired by Hadreas grieving the premature loss of his still-living mother. “Back where the light is streaming, I carry it on my shoulders without her,” he sings, against a current of snare pops from the great Jim Keltner, synths from Alan Wyffels and touches of Pat Kelly’s upright bass. But “Left For Tomorrow,” six months after it was written and finished, became a song for Hadreas’ chihuahua named Wanda, who had just passed away. (Glory is dedicated to her memory.) I am so often in awe of how he writes about absence and how his records always leave room for love even in vacancy, even in the gross, metallic and wrenching horseplay of “Hanging Out”’s final verse (“I see his body loosening / The jaw hangs like circuitry / I’m four on the floor in the dirt / I’m chewing his face like a hog”) or the scribbled, pastoral ballet of “Capezio” (“Flat on her back / With a tongue in her armpit / She told an insane joke / Only I followed”).
We get that space in Glory because of the band Perfume Genius has become. And Glory is a band record, even if not in the obvious sense. Perhaps a person wiser than me could find similarities between these songs and Black Sabbath or the Cardigans, or something, but the contributions from Tim Carr, Keltner, Meg Duffy, Blake Mills, Kelly, Greg Uhlmann and Wyffels are so sweeping and radical, making the album one of the most collaborative efforts Hadreas has ever entered into. On the last few Perfume Genius albums, the demos Hadreas brought to Sound City were fuller. “All the things I wrote in isolation had lots of harmonies or synths,” he says. “I really go in and build a world before I even get to the studio. And in the studio, it can be completed. We can scrap everything.” Glory doesn’t have any sounds from Hadreas’ demos inside of it, because every rough sketch featured only piano, vocal and maybe a stray harmony here or there.
Even when Hadreas was writing those demos, he was thinking of Mills and Duffy, imagining the finished products as “more band-y” without mocking it up himself. “I felt like that was the right way to start, not trying to go in with a bunch of ideas for them once we started it beyond trying to tell them what the song meant to me or was about.” The Perfume Genius band is like a family, and Hadreas holds so much trust in his collaborators, especially on an engagement and connection-forward project like Glory. And they know him just as well as he knows them, and it made the songs better. “Plus, through the counterbalance of trying to explain yourself or hear other people out for their ideas, you end up translating better what you’re trying to say, because you’re having to explain it over and over,” Hadreas adds. “Or you say, ‘Oh, that’s not quite it,’ or, ‘Let go of your idea.’ I left it so much more open this time.”
The Perfume Genius tour that sprawled across 2021 and into 2022 was a legendary run of performances. That, to me, put the project in a brand new font, as Hadreas performed in this great and galvanized dynamic with some of the best musicians in the world, including Duffy and Ulhmann, whose collaborative, one-take improvisational guitar album Doubles is some of the finest and most intimate sentence-finishing music in recent memory. Those intercontinental gigs changed the way Hadreas approaches working with other people, because “every show was the same, but different.” “There was a chemistry between all of us,” he tells me. “Sometimes, you have a good show or a bad show, and everybody’s opinion is different when you leave the stage, but there was still an understanding—when we were all together and fully ripping on the same thing—that was really magical. I hadn’t really experienced it before, in a 360° way on stage. I had it in [‘The Sun Still Burns Here’], but it was different. It wasn’t my show, it wasn’t a rock show. And I had it on other tours too, but it didn’t feel the same as it does now, with this band.” He takes a pause. “They’re all freaks, and they’re all so good and they’re able to hold so many things at once.”
“Playing shows is weird, you have to go to a new place that has its own energy,” he continues. “Everybody’s different that comes to the show each night. You don’t know what the temperature is going to be, but we all know where we want to go. How do you navigate that? Somehow, we were able to—sometimes for the entire show, sometimes for one amazing moment. That, to me, means the whole thing is good. We were able to find it.” That stage-earned truth colored the dynamics of this iteration of the Perfume Genius band, which is why Hadreas’ demos were so barren. “Since we could find it anywhere, when I was writing [Glory] I was like, ‘I’ll make a framework and then, when we go to the studio, we’ll find it again.’”
The last time Mike Hadreas and I spoke, it was late last year, during the rollout of Red Hot’s TRAИƧA compilation. He teamed up with Low’s Alan Sparhawk for a new rendition of “Point of Digust.” “Being in the studio is really hard,” Hadreas told me then, “and that doesn’t always feel good. Performing it is, and your relationship with it afterwards, but the process can feel not spiritual or connected.” “Do you get braver when you trust who’s around you?” I ask him now. “I do, and I also really wanted that,” he replies. “I feel like I just wanted to feel more of the process. It doesn’t have anything to do with other people, because a lot of it is my own ego and my own fears, regardless of what the actual circumstances or situation is. Like, how people say they feel lonely in a crowd of people, that can happen to me a lot in the studio. And that doesn’t have anything to do with the crowd. It happened, and it was difficult too, but in a new way. I knew what I wanted to feel like, and I knew what it required.” It required Hadreas to unlearn what’s hurt him in the studio, in jobs and in relationships and prioritize his love for and trust in the band. But he needed to advocate for himself, too, and trust his own gut—trust himself on when to let go, or when to puff up his chest, or when to hang back and let the band find something.
Opening up his world to other vocalists is a rarity in Hadreas’ history, and Lyttelton vocalist Aldous Harding’s appearance on “No Front Teeth” marks the first credited guest vocalist appearance on a Perfume Genius album since Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering sang on “Sides” eight years ago. On “No Front Teeth,” Harding matches Hadreas’ freak, and the song takes its time climaxing, edging the listener into an explosive tapestry of Mills’ synthesizers and Duffy and Uhlmann’s guitars. But, of course, it is Harding’s voice which gives new life to—and gracefully amplifies—Hadreas’. The track oscillates between moods, turning pop hopelessness into a broken-winged dove coloring misery with euphoria.
Working with Harding wasn’t a challenge for Hadreas at all. In fact, he immediately knew that it was going to be perfect. “And then it was,” he declares. “When I was singing the song, I was like, ‘Oh, God, I can hear her perfectly. This would just be perfect for her voice.’ Then, when I was writing the lyrics, I was like, ‘She will know exactly what I’m talking about.’ And that was true.” Hadreas and Harding toured together years ago, and he even sings on her 2017 album Party, showing up during “Imagining My Man” and “Swell Does the Skull.” “I listened to her albums obsessively,” he says. “We really like each other, and we like each other’s work. Sometimes, people like what you do, but they don’t like things you like about it. The things I like about her music, I think it would make her happy that I liked them. And vice-versa.”
My favorite part of Glory happens in “Full On,” when Wyffels’ flute part, while gently duetting with Mills’ guitar, speaks in paragraphs without stepping up to the microphone. Hadreas says the demo for “Full On” was “piano and gibberish,” but that making it felt “very magical and very arrival-y.” “When that first synth stab comes in and starts repeating, it just feels like it’s immediately there,” he goes on. “That song feels very cinematic to me, and it’s also one of the songs where it just showed up like that. It wasn’t difficult to know where we were trying to go. Once I found the story, I didn’t question the story.” Hadreas tangents, telling me about how Wyffels never went to school for the flute (which he did for the piano) but has played the instrument on other people’s records. “He’s just a technician in a way that I’m not, but he also has access to limitless feeling. I’m surprised by it. When he plays, I’m like, ‘What the hell?’ He’s truly deranged in real life. When he plays piano, I’m like, ‘What the hell is going on in there?’ [‘Full On’] a very magical song, and it’s kind of cheeky, too. There’s a sense of humor to it, but then it’s really sweet and earnest. The story of that song feels, to me, like…” Hadreas trails off, before giggling and quipping, “Well, I’ll just leave it at that.”
In 2022, Hadreas released Ugly Season, which he always called “the dance record” and wrote and produced before he made Set My Heart on Fire Immediately. It was an experimental “movement language”—influenced by the likes of Fairuz and Enya—and derived from his collaborative dance recital with Kate Wallich, “The Sun Still Burns Here,” which was commissioned by the Seattle Theatre Group and Mass MoCA. Though Glory might be a more proper thematic successor to Set My Heart on Fire, Hadreas doesn’t think of Ugly Season as a project separate from the Perfume Genius studio album continuity. “I knew the context was different and the way we were going to make it was different, because I needed 10 minutes of a specific darkness for the dance,” he says, “but I was like, ‘I’m going to make a pop song somehow inside of all that. And I want each of these things to feel like songs, not supplemental, so they can live on their own.’ I wanted it to be an album, but I knew it’d be different than the other ones, in a different way than all the other ones are different to each other.”
Ugly Season was not confessional in the way Glory is. But the dance record was no less personal. “I felt really manic and obsessed with [Kate] and the company and with the thing we were doing,” Hadreas reasons. “If people were watching me when I was doing all this stuff, they could see how I was really into it. And that felt very vulnerable to me, but it felt more like enacting fantasies and going into stories that were like I was a little kid playing in my room—but with all the stuff I know now, like sexual stuff. There were no diary entries in it. It was archetypes and dynamics.” Hadreas says that he and Wallich will make something else together, and that, in-between those projects, they still rent a studio and rehearse, talk and dance. It’s become a big part of him in a more direct way, he says. “I mean, it’s always been,” he clarifies. “But I didn’t think about it. I just did it, and now I am a lot more thoughtful and I have more tools through doing the dance. There’s more places I can go or directions I know I could move towards to get more feeling.”
Dance has a role in Glory, too, beyond naming a song after a famous dancewear brand. Hadreas has been thinking about the set design of his upcoming tour and where he’ll go inside it—what his body should do. That takes time, though. During rehearsals, he rolls around and arches. “I’m like, ‘Oh, this specific angle feels good.’ And then it’s like, ‘Okay, what would the light or the fog do? Do I need a rope?’ It becomes like writing a song: I start with the feeling and then I try to translate it into characters. And then it’s just the character. Maybe someone runs out and hits me, I don’t know.” Hadreas tells me that, despite Wallich’s best attempts to get him to move faster, he’s still obsessed with slow motion. His performances of Glory could be slow again, he says, or he could “intentionally be faster,” “because everything has been difficult so far and has been worthwhile for [him] to get over it.” Few musicians of Hadreas’ caliber have as intimate a relationship with the floor of a stage as him.
“Writing this record was really difficult in a new way. Every part of this has been harder, but I think it’s all better for it,” Hadreas says of Glory. The album is a confessional one, but not in a diaristic sense. Glory is intimate, loaded with the vernacular of movement and a sharp trove of meaning. He reveals something deeper than himself in the “Me & Angel” piano arrangement and the three-part guitar break during “Left For Tomorrow.” Hadreas calls it “ASMR.” “How do you [capture] feelings that can be mirrored or energy that can be transposed on to somebody if they are witnessing it or hearing it?” he wonders. “Sometimes, you have to do that by just saying, ‘It’s this,’ and being really clear. Sometimes you do it just by lying down very slowly.”
Hadreas is proud of Glory, though, if only because he feels like, while making it with his band, he made the right decision more often than ever before—be it lyrically, through the music, or in the movements of the people who recorded it with him, or in Cody Critcheloe’s photography and Andrew J.S.’s art direction, or in the high-style and high-fashion this album demanded from everyone involved. “Everything feels more me and more like an exorcism of all this complicated stuff. The last couple records, they’re more concepts and it’s not so deeply felt in that specific moment. It’s more like a grand idea that I’m trying to [reach]. A lot of things that I’m trying to do right now are things that I really need to do right now. It feels really satisfying.”
When Hadreas sent Critcheloe his initial conceptions for the Glory visuals, he forwarded him movie scenes from The Piano Teacher, Humanity and Julien Donkey-Boy. “I wasn’t sending him the scenes because I wanted it to look or be colored that way,” he recalls. “It was an energy between two characters; I don’t want it to look like that, or be shot in this way, or be styled in this way. I wanted it to feel like this.” There was “wild” research and a level of uncertainty involved in Hadreas’ behavioral backdrop. He wanted to gnaw at the energy shared between characters, between himself and the other people with him in a room. It was never “or” for him and Critcheloe, always “and.” “[I told him], ‘I want it to have a sense of humor, but I want it to be serious, too. I want it to be over the top and campy, but I also want it to be really full of feeling and disturbing,’” Hadreas adds. What we get is a red-haired, spray-tanned version of Perfume Genius, dressed to the nines in high heels, moto jackets; carrying grocery bags and unplugged extension cords; and falling through windows, twisting his body across kitchen floors and flopping across pink bedspreads. And that is what Glory is: a cluttered set-dressing of Americanized, diva-pilled domesticity and melodrama.
Performing is, to Hadreas, “like an attempt or a prayer,” he says. “After I write a song that feels really graceful or thoughtful, especially about something where I don’t feel like that most of the time, doing it for three minutes shows me that it’s in there. I made it, it must be in there. And I’m feeling it. It’s not just an idea.” The idea Hadreas has of himself is that articulating his feelings beyond the music is a difficult task. “I feel really overwhelmed by big feelings a lot,” he reckons, “and then when I have to talk about them, I don’t really know how to, or I refuse to, or I try to soothe myself instead of actually bringing it to the surface or getting it out so it can dissipate and leave.”
Hadreas refers to the feelings he keeps to himself as “treats.” The songs, on the other hand, are big bleh moments that arrive intact with all of their complexities and contradictions. He doesn’t have to fix them or make them sensical anymore. What he is intense about is music, films and books. Wyffels, his partner in life, in love and in music for the last 15 years, makes fun of him for the way he listens to music, which includes an ability to cry immediately. “It doesn’t matter what we’re doing,” he explains. “If a song comes on, I can just fully go somewhere. I think it’s because it’s just everything. It’s just everything there and it becomes beautiful to me, or really heartwarming—even when it’s disgusting or terrifying or filthy. It’s really affirming.”
Five years ago, Set My Heart on Fire Immediately was an album deeply potent with connection—be it missed connections, weird and inexplicable connections or connections both new and ongoing. I always liked that, but I also like that Glory deals heavily with lost connections in the interim. “When you write about the expectations of grief and then go on to experience it, does the meaning of what you’ve made immediately change, or is there a reward behind imagining what loss might feel like and then it existing for what it is?” I ask Hadreas. “I think it just is,” he admits. “I think that’s what’s really hard for me to deal with, that it just is. It’s also hard for me to deal with because I don’t like that. I spend a lot of time trying to change that, and I don’t think that’s working for me anymore.”
When Wanda died, Hadreas had to let grief wash over him. He couldn’t think about whether or not it would, or contend with knowing it was going to. It just was, even though he was “so scared of being overwhelmed” by his own feelings. “But you really need to be fully overwhelmed by them,” he affirms. “You can’t stop it, you can’t try to change it. I’m not happy about it. I guess… I just need it. I need to fully go into all of these things, in a humble way and in a way that’s universal and not unique to me. But how do you do that? I guess I’m trying to write about how I could.”
Glory is a “back and forth between internal and external” conflict. The songs are gay, the songs are prismatic, the songs are romantic and the songs are already timeless, but the songs are also a treasure of boyness and boyhood—a language of ever-changing perspective. The seventh Perfume Genius album chronicles survival through dueling poetic and horrific lenses, but it’s also intimate and sentimental; its strongest track, the kinetic and windswept “Full On,” is as messy and wounded as anything on any album that precedes it, as Hadreas’ narrator watches quarterbacks cry while an unmarked boy goes “limp as a veil, thrown in a cruel fashion.” And yet, the lifespan of queerness holds a particular beauty here; even in violence, a boy is “laid up on the grass and nodding like a violet.” Hedonism wanes in the glow of the living.
During a recent appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Conner O’Malley told the host, “Every moment of life is annoying and it’s barely enjoyable to be here.” I think O’Malley is spot-on unless I am in the company of Perfume Genius’s tenets. Then, I remember what a joy it is to be unconventional and intense and guarded but also full of want and desire. Mike Hadreas’ music is as much its own body as it is the body it came out of to begin with. And, in-between the walls of Glory—songs written alone and spun into grace by friends—there is a fear being conquered. The obligations of tomorrow feel less like today’s chore. Jason, Hadreas’ catch-all pseudonym for the men who’ve entered and exited his life, dreams and stories, returns in “Capezio,” and there is also Dion, Angel and Tate. There are hustlers and homebodies and ancestors; cage doors once closed now swung open; sex and mystery; youth and middle age. You are not alone in these songs, and neither is he.
