When Perfume Genius Stopped Trying To Escape His Body, He Created His Best Album Yet

In place of people, Mike Hadreas has been “communing” with his couch.

“It’s weird writing a record [about], and even beyond that, just being sort of obsessed with wanting people around and looking for connections,” he says on Zoom, surrounded by keyboards and guitars in his Los Angeles home.

“And feeling like I’m more open and more ready to be connected, but that’s not even allowed now. [But] I figured out a way to cut the energy of my house, physically. It’s very… I just rolled around my house.”

Hadreas, who makes music as Perfume Genius, goes on to describe laying on his couch in “some formations” to create the sensation of it being new, laughing at how ridiculous it sounds. “And my couch will be very much my couch, but it’s also not my couch,” he says.

Watching a slightly pixelated Hadreas wave his hands back and forth to explain the couch’s change, the comment makes perfect sense — it requires no follow-up question. This happens a bit while we chat: the meaning isn’t contained by the transcript, but lives in the air of the moment, which he’s well aware of.

“My music is a way for me to articulate ideas and feelings I have, and in ways that I haven’t been able to otherwise,” he tells me, echoing a line he’s said in interviews for the past decade. “I feel like the thing that I’m moving towards always is some sort of transcendence or some like ultimate catharsis where I’m out. I don’t know where I’m trying to go, but I’m constantly trying to go there. It might not even be a real thing.”

Critics try to define that thing, regularly citing artists or queer theorists like José Esteban Muñoz to dive into Perfume Genius’ cerebral baroque-pop. Describing Perfume Genius can cause you to spit out academic buzzwords one after the other, as he tackles the ‘grotesque’ and the ‘utopic’, ‘queer trauma’ and ‘bodily experience’.

When prodded, Hadreas says he’s not informed by theory but wishes he was, joking it’d be nice to just read other people “naming things that you haven’t been able to name”.

But since beginning with MySpace uploads back in 2008, Hadreas has found music articulates it best. And, now, movement — Perfume Genius’ fifth album Set My Heart On Fire Immediately was written alongside a new-found enthusiasm for dance. He’s always been a physical performer but attributes the shift to The Sun Still Burns Here, a contemporary dance performance he composed for, co-created and featured in last year (he also released two stand-alone songs from it, ‘Pop Song’ and ‘Eye In The Wall’). Movements accentuate his words, too.

To describe his song ‘On The Floor’, for instance, Hadreas adopts the ‘alas, poor Yorick’ pose. His right-hand takes up a significant portion of the Zoom screen, and as he talks, he eyes it off. The imaginary skull is meant to be his crush, or an idea of a crush, at least.

“[It’s about] when you become so obsessed with someone that the obsession itself becomes its own living thing, it doesn’t really have anything to do with the other person anymore,” he says.

“[It’s about] when you become so obsessed with someone that the obsession itself becomes its own living thing, it doesn’t really have anything to do with the other person anymore”

“Eventually, it’s just this monument to what you need, or what you want, or what you think you can give them. You’re sort of always talking to and dealing with and dancing around that thing a lot, not the actual person or the situation.”

The track is the most ecstatic on Set My Heart On Fire Immediately. As Hadreas sings about an irresistible “violent current of energy”, the song shimmers through the electric agony with a warbling ’70s synths, landing somewhere between disco and ‘low-budget sci-fi SFX’. It’s as disorientating as it is exciting.

In the video, Hadreas dances in nature, wearing black pants and a tight singlet stained by sweat and the dirt he rolls in — it’s the same colour as his skin, and clings to his body. He throws himself around, dropping to the dirt and bending backwards as if at the will of the drums. Soon, he meets his match as he’s joined by a doppelgänger, and the two pull, twirl and contort each other.

The dance is equally violent as it is tender, a perfect summation of Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, an album which writhes in joint pain and joy, melodramatic and sincere all at once. It’s Perfume Genius’s best album yet.

‘Your Body Changes Everything’

Hadreas’ body has always been centred in his music as Perfume Genius, his sound expanding across the past decade as his relationship to it changes.

His first two albums were littered with sparse, quietly devastating ballads about trauma, substance abuse, and shame around queerness. That made 2014 album Too Bright‘s lead single ‘Queen’, his most well-known song to date, even more boisterous.

A drum-bombastic pop song, it’s a rallying cry to not merely embrace visible queerness, but to find power within the discomfort it can create. Written partly in reaction to US ‘gay panic’ defence laws, the chorus’ line “no family is safe/while I sashay” sweeps in to introduce a breakdown of grunting and echoing whistles, an aggressive performance of ‘weirdness’.

Elsewhere, he wrestles with his body as if an enemy: Hadreas has Crohn’s disease, which can cause chronic pain and discomfort. It lingers largely across the baroque pop No Shape, his 2017 album — as the name implies, it whole-heartedly rejected sonic and bodily limitations. Utopic, moody and tender, it was the kind of ambitious leap forward that signals a coming into one’s own, both artistically and personally.

Which it was, at the time. But in a recent interview, Hadreas said he now realises No Shape was ‘written from a place of restraint aspiring to freedom’. Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, in contrast, doesn’t attempt to escape. It’s far less ethereal, and much more, well, bodied. He says the shift was motivated by working with professional dancers on The Sun Still Burns Here.

“I thought for a long time that the way to get there was internal. It was like thinking.  It was some supernatural energetic thing that if I could somehow access it… I didn’t require anything from my body. And I liked that idea. that was freeing to me.”

“But through the dance —  by being really hyper present and hyperphysical, which is really counterintuitive to me because I felt like I would lose all this like outer space, magic-y stuff —  I actually felt a portal to all of that through that. And so I almost felt like I transcended my body by being very hyper in it.”

He pauses and laughs. It’s not necessarily out of embarrassment, but a recognition of how “wishy-washy” this is to describe.

“Then I was watching the dancers move and dance, I was like, ‘they’re doing what I do when I’m writing my music, but they’re doing it like in the air, and they’re doing it with each other in this room and with these things’.”

“They’re doing what I do when I’m writing my music, but they’re doing it like in the air, and they’re doing it with each other in this room and with these things.”

“That really shook up my thinking because I thought in order to go the places I need to go to write and to just find some of the magic that I find when I’m writing, I needed to be alone and I needed to be out — somewhere else, someone else, something else, you know?”

With that slight twitch, the sound shifted, too. The ethereal, pristinely pretty moments of No Shape still exist on Set My Heart…, but they’re weighed down by gritty distortions, as on lead single ‘Describe’, which is fronted by sludgy guitars. Read it as a depressive plead for someone to remind you of the good in the world that you can’t imagine, let alone feel.

“[‘Describe’ is] such a somber fogginess,” Hadreas says. “And [it’s from] just wanting something to come from it. I’m asking someone to remind me of something or fill in the blanks for me or make it real — this thing, that’s like just out of my reach. And there’s still hope, there’s still hope in it.”

“The writing became the way it did because I became really greedy for that feeling,” he says. “I wanted all of my feelings to have a dirt pit to roll around in.”

When the album was announced, the press release was accompanied by a lyrical “impression” by poet Ocean Vuong. He described Perfume Genius’ music as “where the body (queer, healing, troubled, wounded, possible and gorgeous) sings itself into its future”.

On Set My Heart… that future isn’t utopic, as it was on No Shape: it’s volatile. String accompaniments sit alongside grunge-reverbs and airy, Cocteau Twins-esque bridges; steel guitars and castanets slide in; contentment comes and goes.

“Within my records, I go in a bunch of different directions, but they all feel like it’s always coming from the same source,” he says. “So it never feels like I’m making some really crazy turn — even though it maybe sounds like that, within the span of 20 seconds.”

Hadreas hears the unity: maybe you will too, unless you’re still stuck on the couch.

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Perfume Genius’ fifth album Set My Heart On Fire Immediately is out May 15 via Remote Control Records / Matador Records.

Jared Richards is Junkee’s Night Editor and freelance writer. This is part of Take Time, his column on pop culture. Follow him on Twitter.