Beauty and ugliness can be doppelgängers, if only for the length of a song. On September 23rd, Mike Hadreas, who performs as Perfume Genius, will release “Too Bright,” a profoundly beautiful record that remains intense throughout its brief, thirty-three-minute running time. The album, his third, was co-produced by Portishead’s Adrian Utley, and sounds much larger than his previous albums, which were mostly duets made up of vocals and either guitar or piano. In extremis is the default state for the narrator of a Perfume Genius song, but that doesn’t mean that the work is showy or loud. What you notice first in Hadreas’s new songs is silence, which he then breaks apart with his tremulous but accurate voice and a host of supporting instruments.
Although “Too Bright” is being released by Matador Records, a prominent indie-rock label, Hadreas’s music has little to do with rock or dance, or any genre with obvious or aggressive timekeeping. At its most dramatic, it resembles torch songs. Hadreas has been compared to Rufus Wainwright—both are typecast as “gay piano,” Hadreas told me—but that description is unlikely to help you understand his work. Wainwright, a virtuosic piano player, typically uses the lower registers of his voice. Hadreas, by contrast, often ends up in his head voice, a bony echo, and his piano figures are reduced, small, and spaced out. His aesthetic is marked by a lack of interest in anything flippant or goofy. He is more indebted to the work of PJ Harvey and Nina Simone—two artists he cites repeatedly—and perhaps the softer moments of R.E.M. or the less operatic side of Antony and the Johnsons. This loosely defined area of music concentrates on a kind of seriousness that isn’t afraid to approach melodrama but is after bigger game: catharsis, beauty, and truth—positively old-fashioned concepts.
“Queen,” the record’s first single, is a steely, menacing song. The lyrics are fairly clear, even if you’re not familiar with its slang: “Don’t you know your queen? Cracked, peeling, riddled with disease—don’t you know me? No family is safe when I sashay.” In slightly veiled language, Hadreas claims the flamboyance of the stereotypical gay man, and then brandishes it as both a right and a threat. The song is anchored by a simple but heavy drumbeat—for Hadreas, this is novel—and various buzzing and twinkling lines that frame his voice. Though there is a piano buried amid some unidentified woofing and a lovely bit of choral singing that ends the song—both efficient and epic, at under four minutes—you would never hear this song and think, Oh, the voice-and-piano guy.
Hadreas wrote about the song in an early version of the album’s promotional material: “There is some satire to the song obviously, but if we are being real—if these fucking people want to give me some power—if they see me as some sea witch with penis tentacles that are always prodding and poking and looking to convert the Muggles—well here she comes.” Hadreas works in the area of pop culture made by gay men that straight culture handles as if it were microwavable food innovations—tentatively, gingerly, and with fascination.
Hadreas is from Seattle, of Greek descent, and his formal piano training is limited to basic childhood lessons. After studying painting in school, he began making home recordings; they compose the bulk of his début album, “Learning,” from 2010. His first show was the same year, at the small Vera Project club, in Seattle, where he opened for a muscular indie-rock band called A Sunny Day in Glasgow. Hadreas’s style comes clearly into focus on the second album, from 2012, “Put Your Back N 2 It.” That version of Perfume Genius could have a long shelf life, without much alteration. The song “Dirge”—you’ll see this coming—features Hadreas singing in a hazy, high voice, softened and enlarged with reverb, as is his piano. There is no timekeeping, and the song, which quotes Edna St. Vincent Millay, feels like a prayer or an invocation: “Boys that held him dear, do your weeping now. All you loved of him lies here. Do your weeping now.” The effect is pure: it’s a secular kind of hymn, agnostic about sexuality.
Hadreas’s music is aggressive in conception but often gentle in execution—or has been until now. “Too Bright” is a thrill, because Hadreas turns out to be more than the guy in the charnel-house cabaret, affecting but slightly dour, short on musical variety. With Utley’s battery of synthesizers and unusual instruments, Hadreas sings more confidently than before; he also increases the level and range of creepy things in his lyrics. The song “My Body” hints just slightly at the barely cloaked terror of Utley’s work with Portishead, and invokes artists far from pop music: Jean Genet, for one, who wrote extensively about the status of the outsider through stories about degradation of the body; and Dennis Cooper, who did the same, later, in New York.
The basis of “My Body” is a low, thrumming vamp in three-four time, like the opening of a song by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds or like a disturbing Nancy Sinatra single. But, in the full two minutes and nineteen seconds of this song, someone else’s work might just be getting going. Hadreas sticks to the point, even when it’s a weird point. He doesn’t need his “big step forward” record to be an endless double album. When “My Body” hits its thematic peak, which serves as a sort of chorus in a song with no traditional division points, the music becomes a hybrid, guttering buzz that stops and starts while Hadreas goes into a strangled falsetto: “I wear my body like a rotted peach. You can have it if you handle the stink. I’m as open as a gutted pig. On the small of every back, you’ll see a picture of me wearing my body.” The song ends with a high-pitched shriek and what sounds like a few distant land mines being set off. Fiesta!
In feel, though not much in sound, Hadreas recalls Diamanda Galas, another performer of Greek origin. Though unlikely to come up in conversation now, unfortunately, Galas was a central figure in the downtown music scene of the late eighties and early nineties. Her work involved physically demanding singing that was sometimes indistinguishable from screaming, and if she needed to be covered in blood when she sang so be it. Hadreas, however, is still developing a live show that can address the extremity of his own music; he told me that to duplicate all the textures of “Too Bright” would likely require either lots of prerecorded tracks or a large ensemble of musicians, so his current touring band isn’t trying to.
“Too Bright” is one of the most encouraging albums of the moment, in its delivery of exuberant sounds by a spiky, unbiddable performer. It is outside most conceptions of pop, whether gay or straight; emotional heaviness isn’t an easy sell, no matter who you are. Hadreas is developing not by becoming easier to like but by becoming more fully himself. If it’s hard to take, the warning is right there in the title. ♦
