Something’s amiss on the cover of Glory, the seventh studio album from art-rock shapeshifter Perfume Genius. Framed in the middle of a wood-paneled suburban rec room strewn with extension cords, frontman Mike Hadreas lies in a crumpled heap: limbs twisted, belt undone, the line of a bronze spray tan peeking above the waist of his whiskered skinny jeans.
“It looks like it could be sensual, it could be mid-dance — but it also looks like I could be sick, or something’s wrong,” the Iowa-born songwriter tells Boulder Weekly on a recent video call from his home in Los Angeles. “Falling is stupid and silly, but it looks very serious, and everything about the cover had all those things at once. I felt connected to it, and it felt very personal, but there's some absurdity. It felt like the record.”
This uncanny image welcomes listeners to Hadreas’ teetering world of confessional anthems, aching piano ballads and amped-up asskickers. Drawing much of its power from his kaleidoscopic approach to songcraft and style, the album opens with a writhing guitar groove (“It’s a Mirror”) driven by a paralyzing fear of outside contact: “What do I get out of being established? / I still run and hide when a man’s at the door.”
“The hardest things to share are the ones that make you feel like a baby,” he says ahead of his June 21 show at Denver’s Gothic Theatre. “They're usually really simple things: I'm scared. You're almost embarrassed to admit they’re problems. It feels like you should be dealing with more advanced ones. It doesn't mean they're uncomplicated, but they're tender.”
‘A bunch of questions, probably forever’
Tapping into the tenderness of his inner child, Hadreas hit a nerve. It’s nothing new for the celebrated recording artist whose delicate 2010 debut Learning and tearjerker follow-up Put Your Back N 2 It explored the darker corners of his past to unpack heavy topics like addiction, domestic violence and the plight of gay men in America. But while those early offerings felt like healing exercises written from a distance, he says Glory was more of an open wound.
“I didn't feel like I was on the other side of a lot of the things I was writing about. With the first couple records, I was zoomed out because I was on the other side. The records after that were like projections and dreams, and they had more desire and fantasy in a way that felt like looking to the future,” he says. “This one feels more messy and close to me still. Leaving that all intact helped me feel kind of graceful about all these things that don't really feel graceful.”
Those less-than-graceful feelings found an uneasy home on Glory, where Hadreas examines longtime struggles from a newfound vantage. From searching for wholeness in isolation (“Clean Heart”) to the gripping fear of death befalling a loved one (“Left for Tomorrow”) and the strange internal conflict of turning pain into art (“In a Row”), holding this deep-seated turmoil up to the light was a process that didn’t come easy.
“I felt kind of stuck, and being stuck feels really selfish sometimes. Because you're not available to other people, and you're doing the same thing over and over, thinking you're gonna figure it out,” Hadreas, 43, says. “The older I get, the more I realize I'm not gonna just think my way out of all of this shit. I'm not going to be able to reckon with it fully, or have an answer. It's just gonna just be a bunch of questions, probably forever, and it's hard to be OK with that.”
‘We’re all here together’
All that restless searching reflects Hadreas’ animating drive to mine new emotional and sonic territory with each release under the Perfume Genius banner. Returning to the studio last year with superstar producer Blake Mills — whose call sheet includes giants like Bob Dylan, Fiona Apple and Beck — he found himself ready to take another big swing.
“I put a lot of records out, so I’ve gone to a lot of places [musically] and tried a lot of things, and I never want to repeat myself,” he says. “I don't go in with intentions before I'm writing. I want to just see what's there and try to find the risky thing, which can look and sound a million different ways. It doesn't always mean screaming because it's so crazy or whatever. It can be quiet.”
Take the album’s Side A centerpiece “Me and Angel,” a hushed and quivering love song about Hadreas’ longtime romantic and creative partner Alan Wyffels. In classic Perfume Genius fashion, the bare-bones piano ballad whips up big feelings without rising above a whisper: “Who am I to keep a smile from your face,” he sings in his lilting baritone. “If he's an angel, he's an angel, he's an angel.”
“I had to keep leaving the studio because I was crying,” he says. “For as depressing and sad as everybody thinks my music is, I don't usually feel like that when I'm doing it. But I think I just really want relief lately. I really want some catharsis. If my body gets any tiny pinhole into that, it just fully floods out. I guess that song is just me making a pretty big portal for that.”
Regardless of volume or velocity, the catharsis of Glory is larger than life — and now might be the time for that emotional release to come in the form of a queer love song. With the LGBTQ+ community under threat across the map, Hadreas hopes the open-hearted sincerity of his music can offer a lifeline in an uncertain world where the ground is shifting underfoot.
“Every day there's something more horrifying. It feels like now you can't trust anything. You can only trust the people you love and try to keep everyone safe,” he says. “At a show, we're all here together, and I think we need that now. I'm just excited to be in a room with a bunch of gay people.”
ON THE BILL: Perfume Genius with urika's bedroom. 9 p.m. Saturday, June 21, Gothic Theatre, 3263 S. Broadway, Englewood. $42