I'll never forget the first time I encountered the music of Perfume Genius. For some reason, the music video for the singer-songwriter born Mike Hadreas's 2012 breakthrough single "Hood" appeared as a suggested clip while I was mindlessly scrolling Pornhub, living alone for the first time in my young life, freshly moved into a ground-floor studio apartment on Toronto's Avenue Road. His face stared out from the thumbnail, wearing his signature crooked, pained expression as a hulking, shirtless man brushed his hair like he were some sort of antique doll.
The gigantic co-star of the video was gay porn star Arpad Miklos, who would be found dead by suicide in his New York City apartment only a year after the video was shot. The video has since been posthumously dedicated to his memory, with "Hood" and its visuals remaining striking examples of queer confessional pop music: heartbreaking and addictive without being saccharine or embarrassing. From here on out, Perfume Genius would rise to become the king of queer male ennui and a well-recognized critical darling of indie pop.
After more than a decade of shapeshifting, violent shedding and experimental transitions, Perfume Genius returns to his roots on his bright new record, Glory — a back-to-basics pop rock album that should excite his fan base, while also inviting a new generation of outsiders to peer through the blinds of his own musical ground-floor one-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of town.
Lead single "It's a Mirror" is classic Perfume Genius, evocative of an orange-hot late summer day coupled with the prickly sadness of the Sunday scaries. It's joyous, brash, and feels rightfully exhausted. With a motorcycle gang of leather-clad butch lesbians chasing Hadreas down a remote highway, its video is reflective of the world-building seen throughout Glory: a queer landscape built from scratch, elegant in its simplicity, like the chalk-drawn town of Dogville. When Hadreas douses himself in gasoline and lights a match, the moment is more empowering than tragic.
Each track here is partly conceived as a character sketch, and its ensemble consists of Dion, Angel, Tate and Jason. Thankfully, the semi-concept is rarely recognizable while swimming through the surprising depths of this abandoned motel pool of a record. What arises most is the simplicity of its confessional songwriting and production, referencing previous songs from Hadreas's lengthy career as a welcome and organic return to form.
However, there is never the sense that Hadreas is retreating to familiarity in an attempt to relive old successes; it's instead an authentic Saturn return for an artist who is never afraid to try something new — like the darkwave experimentation of his previous record, Ugly Season, which sounded more like a late-game Björk release than the heartbreaking confessions of his first few records. (To be clear, that's a compliment.)
The success of Glory comes from the balance of melody and noise, a trait it shares with the 2014 Perfume Genius release Too Bright. Both are collections of tracks that hybridize moments of danceable indie pop with frightening sequences of dark underworld droning that you might expect to hear on a Swans record. Hadreas is an artist who can — and absolutely will — do both, sometimes at the same time. "No Front Teeth," a standout cut featuring Aldous Harding, is exemplary proof, stung with a '90s-driven folksy Americana energy that's scattered throughout the project like a suburban gothic motif.
The refined and fine-tuned "Clean Heart" is more classical Perfume Genius. Toying with the theme of masculinity like a kitten playing with a half-dead mouse, Hadreas has perfected the art of musically challenging and investigating manhood by brushing its hair with his own antique brass-handled brush. "I saw every quarterback crying," he sings on "Full On," another track that gently highlights the fragility of masculinity and the shackles it enforces upon its dedicated followers. Hadreas approaches this toughness without judgment or anger, choosing instead to tie it to the bedpost and edge it with kindness, experience and desire.
With its fresh simplicity, Glory is a blazing return to form for Perfume Genius, who, on his seventh album, has come full circle as a pop star that has never been afraid to emerge as something brand new, familiar, or even as No Shape at all. It's an album empowered by queer exhaustion — and instead of laying down to rest, it happily sets itself on fire.