“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.
ALBUM REVIEWS
The leather jackets and skinny jeans worn by Noah Dillon and Chandler Ransom Lucy have become something of a signature, and the pair have hovered around the edges of the pop worlds in New York and Los Angeles for quite some time. First highlighted by NME during the Dimes Square resurgence in 2023, The Hellp have gradually stepped away from their earlier indie-sleaze imitation and leaned into something far more thoughtful. Their wild, neon-tinged party vibe has been traded for a more cinematic electronic approach that still holds onto a confident, self-aware attitude.
Dillon and Lucy started releasing music as The Hellp in 2016, with early mixtapes rooted in the chaotic nights and carefree behaviour once associated with NYC’s indie-sleaze staples like LCD Soundsystem and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Over time, though, they’ve earned a steadily growing respect from critics. That rise has come through both their underground gigs, which have included a show at London’s Corsica Studios with Fakemink as support, and through Dillon’s expanding visual work that recently reached Rosalía’s ‘LUX’ album and a pair of music videos for 2hollis.
As ‘Riviera’ approached release, the duo shared: “We knew our next project would need to be a bit more mature… we refuse to become stagnant. ‘Riviera’ is more solemn, restrained and impassioned than anything we’ve done before.” The finished album feels like Dillon and Lucy carefully balancing identity and openness, theatricality and direct emotion.
The lead release, ‘Country Road’, carries a late-night heaviness, the kind of confession you would quietly tell a friend in a club’s smoking area. Its lonely tone is surrounded by glitching electronics and a rising bridge that points to the exhaustion that follows endless nights out. Tracks like ‘New Wave America’ and ‘Cortt’ deepen what the duo mention in their liner notes as a “desperate story of the disparate Americana.” Both pieces broaden the album’s emotional landscape and offer clear-eyed commentary on reluctantly stepping into adulthood.
When ‘Riviera’ shifts into ‘Doppler’, the tone brightens for a moment as hopeful synths lift Dillon’s words about yearning and heartbreak into an emotional peak. And in the final moments of the record, The Hellp land on something instantly familiar to anyone who has drifted away from the club scene. The Kavinsky-like opening of ‘Here I Am’ nods to their early inspirations, while the closing track ‘Live Forever’ arrives with a slow, grounded maturity, built around Dillon repeating the line: “I don’t want to live forever.”
‘Riviera’ holds far less disorder than The Hellp’s earlier releases. This turn inward marks an important risk for a duo once fuelled by the momentum of a downtown New York comeback. By easing off the frenzy, The Hellp have stepped out of the party’s lingering haze and returned with a style that feels more refined and more aware of itself than anything they have created before.
