Whenever a storm is about to hit Los Angeles, Mike Hadreas is ready with torches, batteries, and bags packed for what he is convinced will be an inevitable evacuation. “I’m not playing around,” the artist better known as Perfume Genius says with a laugh. “We’ll [end up staying] at home all day, and the next day we’ll hear our friends went to the movies, hung out…” This tendency to fear the worst provides the theme for his self-flagellating new single “It’s a Mirror”, the first from his seventh album, Glory. You hear it in the lopsided, angry guitars, and in the way Hadreas sings “It’s a chorus reaching for us/ Swarming locusts wherever you go”.
As Perfume Genius, Hadreas has carved out a space over the last 15 years in which he is able to thrive as one of America’s most avant-garde pop stars – and one of its most critically acclaimed. His fanbase, with good reason, tends to be obsessive, while his flair for melding elegiac, emotionally acute songwriting with musical pomp has led to two Grammy nominations, for the 2017 album No Shape and for his 2022 collaboration with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Spitting Off the Edge of the World”. For him, music has always been the purest form of self-expression.
