Glory

“Half of my whole life is gone,” Mike Hadreas sighed on the opening of Perfume Genius’ fifth album, the high-water mark Set My Heart on Fire Immediately. Though that may sound like an expression of regret, Hadreas sang it with a kind of guarded optimism—opening a door into a record that gleefully documented life’s contradictions through odes to connections to the self and others.

On Glory, Perfume Genius’ latest, Haderas is once again mulling the grand arc of his existence. He ponders “my entire life…” on “No Front Teeth” before pausing. Then, he confesses: “It’s fine.” On the nervy, agoraphobic “It’s a Mirror,” he admits, “My whole life is/Open just outside the door.” He’s isolated, stuck inside his own agonizing thought patterns, and he knows something more appealing—immensely gratifying, even—is right there. But he isn’t sure he can reach it.

Glory traffics in these moments of desperation and alienation, themes that are not entirely new territory for Hadreas. Much of the album was written during COVID lockdown, the forced retreat compelling Hadreas to confront the way personal baggage doesn’t inevitably recede with age. “Being out in the world is really terrifying to me,” he explained to The Guardian. “I was trying to confront a lot of that—like how do I engage, how do I be inside of my relationships, inside of the world, a part of things more, even though I’m scared?” We’re now five years out from the start of that collective claustrophobia, when many of us were forced into uncomfortably close quarters with our own psyches, and our current moment doesn’t lack for art about its effects. Thankfully, Glory doesn’t take the pandemic as its subject. Instead, it brings a new perspective to themes that have long tugged at Hadreas: anxiety, grief, disconnection. The sensation of being trapped inside one’s own mind, wanting desperately to shed one’s immaturity and re-engage more generously with the world: This is, unfortunately, a timeless concern, and here, Hadreas renders it in the detailed, moody technicolor he’s mastered.

Glory is rich with beauty, but the band—Hadreas; longtime partner Alan Wyfells; producer Blake Mills; and drummers Tim Carr and Jim Keltner, bassist Pat Kelly, and guitarists Meg Duffy and Greg Uhlmann—twists it just enough to let in flashes of the strange and idiosyncratic. An insistent, buzzing synth interrupts the transcendence of “Left for Tomorrow”; “Clean Heart” balances twitchy percussion and incandescent keys; “In a Row” thrums mischievously. A third of the way through “No Front Teeth,” the song drops its restrained elegance and becomes a full-band thrash; later, it repeats that trick again, the band fading out and leaving only Aldous Harding’s exquisite voice before swerving back to strummed guitars and an eerie swirl of synths. Its whiplash is delicious, like a rollercoaster where the amazement of the peak is only matched by the thrill of seeing the universe turned upside-down a moment later.

In moments, Glory evokes the haunted songcraft of 2022’s Ugly Season, which Hadreas wrote to soundtrack a modern dance performance. Though that album largely lacked hooks and pop structures, the influence of its widescreen, expressive production threads throughout Glory. Extended instrumental sections—“Left for Tomorrow”’s ponderous, gently swaying introduction; “Capezio”’s vaporous, woozy final third—linger like smoke slowly dissipating from a forgotten cigarette. “Hanging Out”’s heavy drones and hazy atmospheres call back to Ugly Season’s cinematic darkness, continuing the corroded textures Hadreas fostered all the way back on 2014’s Too Bright.

Compared to the brazen Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, the narrators and characters who populate Glory are tentative, uncertain. On “It’s a Mirror,” Hadreas states his paranoia plainly: “What do I get out of being established?/I still run and hide when a man’s at the door.” On “Left for Tomorrow,” he anticipates the grief of learning to live without a loved one; on “Capezio,” his strained falsetto seems to narrate an interrupted, maybe impossible, erotic connection. The album’s sparest songs (“Me & Angel,” “Dion,” “Glory”) are reverential, impressionistic sketches of love and loss. The songs rarely contain straightforward narratives, but Hadreas’ voice—wavering and gliding from deep in his chest to high, breathy harmonies—pulls you into their emotional core.

Hadreas’ greatest early works were his most heartrending, astonishing in their clear-eyed vulnerability, but his songwriting only became more stunning as it embraced pure fantasy and fearlessness: the camp excellence of “Queen,” the fantastical liberation of “Slip Away,” the lovesick delight of “On the Floor.” Glory isn’t entirely undaunted, and it’s better for it. These are not inherently songs of conquering or confronting fear—Hadreas has gifted us enough in that regard—but of learning to live beside it. That uneasy coexistence, Glory suggests, is part of a whole life, too. It requires its own kind of courage. But its reward is its own kind of beauty.