With each of his albums as Perfume Genius, Mike Hadreas shakes out his pent-up desires—to love, to express queerness, or simply to dance. On his seventh studio album, Glory, he dials back the climactic pop of 2017’s No Shape and 2020’s sprawling Set My Heart on Fire Immediately in favor of subtler compositions that lurch and wobble over layers of alt-rock and orchestral instrumentation. From this ornate environment, Hadreas delivers tactile poetry and pained self-examinations, extracting catharsis from isolation and anxiety.
Hadreas has, in recent years, displayed a penchant for the baroque, and his lush and eclectic songs have conveyed a romantic grandiosity. When Glory’s opening track, “It’s a Mirror,” kicks off with acoustic guitar, it’s not just a deft stylistic heel turn, but a shift from extravagance to a grungy groundedness befitting the song’s claustrophobic lyrics. “It’s a siren, muffled crying/Breaking me down soft and slow,” Hadreas sings of life outside his front door, finding both comfort and torture in existing as a recluse.
Not unlike “Describe,” the heartland rock-inspired lead single off of Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, “It’s a Mirror” and the Aldous Harding-assisted “No Front Teeth,” which undulates between rousing, rootsy verses and a feathery chorus, are somewhat outliers, as the songs that follow are ethereal and lush. Even with Blake Mills’s painterly production, though, Glory feels compact and introspective, with a current of uneasiness that harks back to 2010’s mournful Learning.
A question at the center of Glory is whether to surrender to life’s crushing anxieties. On “Clean Heart,” Hadreas feels himself drowning until he finds that “Time, it makes a clean heart/When you’re miles away from it all/And the dream is gone.” On “Me & Angel,” a plaintive piano ballad that spotlights his singular, sinewy vocals, he resigns himself to being a lover left behind. “Who am I to keep a smile from your face?” Hadreas asks, surrendering the fight for an old flame.
The moments of splendor promised by the album’s title aren’t blinding bursts of passion but quiet triumphs of the spirit. “Left for Tomorrow,” adorned with the hum of horns and lurching bass, presses forward with the insistence of a mantra as Hadreas assembles a patchwork of metaphors for moving on: “Back where the light is streaming/I carry it on my shoulders.” On “Full On,” he unravels the binds of heteromasculinity, declaring, “I saw every quarterback crying,” as spritely strings blossom all around him.
“In a Row,” Glory’s propulsive apex, casts Hadreas as a captive in the trunk of a car, disoriented and suffering. But when he sings of “Calling out from every corner/’Til somebody comes,” the heavenly wall of sound shrouding him suggests that he’s on the verge of freedom.
In the spirit of finding beauty in confinement, the album’s final tracks make lethargy and uncertainty sound blissful, and Hadreas and Mills imbue even moments of reflective quiet with simmering intensity. On the closing title track, Hadreas’s falsetto intones like a flute, his voice melting into the song’s melancholic orchestrations. Perhaps, he suggests, this is what glory is: to be subsumed completely into music and emotion.
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