Perfume Genius – Glory
On Glory, his seventh studio album as Perfume Genius, Mike Hadreas pulls off another career-best
Mike Hadreas has written about our bodies and how easily they break before. But perhaps never so viscerally – or with as much bombast – as on No Front Teeth, Hadreas making the gap left where familiarity used to be seem as beautiful as what was there before. They’re 'broken apart and shining', now sheathed within the fabric of his clothes; there may be no front teeth, but there’s still 'a feeling I know'.
Glory is a well-trained beast, but it begins snarling. It’s a Mirror and No Front Teeth fucking rock. The latter’s opening guitar line comes in instantly iconic, as recognisable as Sweet Home Alabama. Hadreas toys with classic rock and Americana sounds masterfully, these canonical totems of genre upended by his tenderness and specificity of imagery. This is his most band-driven album, and all the players here are vibrating on their own collective frequency.
However, the one-two punch of the opening tracks mask something subtler. Beyond the feedback, there are gothic experiments and ethereal flute ballads, the soft underside to this prickly veneer. Hadreas has always been sonically daring, but with his last two records, and now Glory, his work with partner and collaborator Alan Wyffels and producer Blake Mills balances adventurousness with confident coherence.
Take Capezio, a stunning and vivid vignette about the awkwardness and inscrutability of glances and gestures during a sexual encounter. Room tone sits thick under an off-kilter bassline, and Hadreas’s vocal reverberates through what seems like a rippling invisible field. In this picture, he pairs the universality of bodily fluids with the particularity of the dance shoe of its title. You’re right there next to him. Self-deprecatory humour and pathos fill his short stories. On the opener, he’s contemplating the point of stature and acclaim when he can be so riddled with anxiety when interacting with strangers. On In a Row, he’s 'locked inside a moving car, flopping in the trunk' but still thinking 'of all the poems I’ll get out'.
In the press notes, Hadreas talks about filling the space of queer middle age, after the cultural guidebook for being young and gay runs out. If there’s any question about aging into creative irrelevance, it certainly doesn’t exist for Perfume Genius, who continues to pull off career bests with each new release. Doing so 'now in quiet glory, finding shade', as he sings on the title track, makes it no less impressive.
Listen to: No Front Teeth, Left For Tomorrow, Capezio