Set My Heart on Fire Immediately was the title of Perfume Genius’ 2020 studio album, and of course, there’s always the fear of burning out. ‘It’s a Mirror’, the confident lead single from his astounding new album Glory that marked a shift from the diffuse grooves of 2022’s Ugly Season, still bows down to the feeling of “a siren, muffled crying/ Breaking me down soft and slow.” But if there is a weariness seeping through the familiarly lush and vibrant tapestry of Glory – which reunites Mike Hadreas with producer Blake Mills, while elevating his backing band of Meg Duffy (Hand Habits), Greg Uhlmann, Tim Carr, Jim Keltner, and Pat Kelly – it’s not at the expense of catharsis, freedom, or indeed glory. The album is tender-hearted and open-ended, loosening into a level of directness that not only feels new for Hadreas, but gives even its heavier subjects a weightless air. “My entire life… it’s fine,” he sings on ‘No Front Teeth’. The affirming going to keeps hanging in the silence.
1. It’s a Mirror
A startingly direct, almost blistering way to kick off the album and its promotional cycle, ‘It’s a Mirror’ tries to beam a path toward personal pleasure and progress: “Can I get off without reliving history/ And let every echo just sing to itself?/ Can I move on without knowing specifics/ While memories hum like a hive shaken out?” In one of the record’s most quotable coutlets, he measures his growing artistic status against unshakable internal insecurity: “What do I get out of being established?/ I still run and hide when a man’s at the door.” The answer he wraps the chorus around is a gentle sigh, far from affirmative yet revelatory in its expanse: every echo, memory, tear, and sickness is mirrored down from every song, film, or person that’s ever captured you. They make as much as stare into you.
2. No Front Teeth [feat. Aldous Harding]
Just how far down does the mirror go? The second song boldly stretches back to “where the starting line is,” juxtaposiing a feathery – even “angelic” feels appropriate given Hadreas’ language a few tracks down – guest appearance from Aldous Harding against the most unexpectedly ferocious and serpentine mix of synths, guitars, and drums that Hadreas’ band could whip up. The singer-songwriter yearns for an untouchable future and past alike; Harding makes it sound within reach, then explodes out of view.
3. Clean Heart
Starting the album with all three of its singles, in the exact order they were rolled out, puts Glory at the risk of seeming front-loaded. But as subdued as ‘Clean Heart’ feels for a single, it claims lines that are big enough to capture the whole project: “Time it makes a clean heart/ When you’re miles away from it all/ And the dream is gone.” ‘Clean Heart’ sounds fittinglyngly hollowed-out and twinkling, until the drums fire it up, then quickly withdraw. It makes time sound like a plunge, one that can drag you down so deep it can cleanse your soul anew.
4. Me & Angel
To call ‘Me & Angel’ a song of naked intimacy would be an understatement, because no one nails a stark piano ballad like Perfume Genius. Thematically, it follows on from the previous tracks to reveal love in all its magical forms: a mirror, a core that holds your shape, a heavenly body that transcends it. Yet Hadreas makes it sound so grounded, letting out a hm at the end of a verse like a smile snuck between lovers in a crowd.
5. Left for Tomorrow
A lot of the melancholy on Japanese Breakfast’s new album, which Blake Mills also produced, is anticipatory, and the same is true of the grief on ‘Left for Tomorrow’ – or at least it started out that way. (Glory is dedicated to Hadreas’ beloved chihuahua Wanda, who died six months after the album was completed.) But it’s also where all the light you might have been expecting from a Perfume Genius generously starts to pour in. Those horns that ascend after Hadreas lands on the titular words? A spectacular moment, whether or not it arrived as spontaneously as it sounds.
6. Full On
Unlike most of the songs on Glory, ‘Full On’ zooms in on one particular idea or image: a scene of wounded masculinity, shot through with affection from a single perspective. Hadreas’ language is filmic, but his voice, accompanied by his partner Alan Wyffels on flute, is right there on the field, yearning for a bigger part. Mills plucks a single guitar chord so insistently that it starts to creak by the end, the song’s fractured heart.
7. Capezio
Featuring the return of Jason, the pseudonymous man from the Set My Heart on Fire Immediately track of the same name, ‘Capezio’ is muddier and more esoteric than other songs on Glory, though more in its humour than its beauty. The interpersonal dynamics are harder for the listener to discern, but it’s not long until you realize the narrator, too, is trembling for focus. Then you kind of feel in on the joke.
8. Dion
It may be introducing a new character – and what a heavenly name – but it’s a closing credits-type ballad that makes you feel like you’re already familiar with the story of Dion. The original demo is so palpable beneath the song’s fragile surface, the musicians only adding subtle flourishes, even as Hadreas sings of a rising storm. “All the light she brought in/ Wanting something different,” he laments. You can still hear it streaming.
9. In a Row
Like ‘Full On’, ‘In a Row’ is granular in its cinematic scope, with Hadreas’ dark humour further peeking through the surface. The narrator is trapped in the trunk of a car, “counting every bump,” but sees this light at the of the tunnel: “Think of all the poems I’ll get out.” In reality, of course, Hadreas’ lyrics hardly come so neatly ordered, and you don’t need to dig so deep beneath the narrative of the song to grasp his actual frustration, which remains all tangled up.
10. Hanging Out
Don’t let the title fool you: ‘Hanging Out’ is not fun in any sense of the word, but rather an unfiltered manifestation of grief, shame, and anxiety, which sounds not only dreadful but disorienting and destabilizing. (“I went to a psychic once and said this but explained to her, ‘I don’t think that there is actually an evil presence’ and she just went: ‘No, actually, I see it.’ That’s what these songs are: what if there was a demon, and I loved it?” Hadreas said in a recent interview.) Even Hadreas’ collaborators, who of course help animate the atmosphere, seem to be playing out their own absence, “tracing every lonely mark,” to borrow a line from the previous song. “I’m four on the floor in the dirt,” he sings with a tenderness that surpasses vulnerability. “I’m chewing his face like a hog.”
11. Glory
“Loosened, roving stray/ Guest of body.” “Now in quiet glory/ Finding shade.” 12 words, in a peculiar order, sung in a falsetto that blurs into the radiant arrangement. It makes you fixate on each small pairing, but especially “guest of body” – leaves you thinking, in other words, about oblivion. More than doomful or dark, though, the effect is contextualizing and, quite satisfyingly, mirror-like: here is the reality of you. Here’s now. Better relax into it.
