Mike Hadreas feels that he had self-destructive tendencies as young as seven. “I saw a white van with no windows go by,” he says. “And I remember waiting around, hoping that I was going to get kidnapped. I wanted the story. I wanted the intensity of it.”
As he got older, that urge never quite went away. “I would put myself in situations that were dark or demoralising, kind of for research, or to be able to say that I did that crazy thing,” he says. In a Row, a highlight from Glory, Hadreas’s new album as Perfume Genius, makes fun of that impulse, slyly skewering the idea that you have to suffer for your art: “Think of all the poems I’ll get out,” his narrator sings, trapped in the boot of a car.
“I still want to watch horror movies. I still want to go somewhere and feel something extreme,” Hadreas says. “I’m just not as self destructive … or attention-seeking.”
Hadreas, an elven-looking 43-year-old, is speaking on a video call from the Los Angeles home he shares with his boyfriend, Alan Wyffels – a classically trained musician who has worked with Hadreas as his music has shifted from raw, sparse folk into confrontational synth-pop (on 2014’s Too Bright); ornate chamber-rock (2017’s No Shape); gritty, experimental Americana (2020’s Set My Heart On Fire Immediately); and now, with Glory, a nervy hybrid of all that came before. Like any great pop star, Hadreas has marked this era with a new look: his brown hair has been dyed a faded shade of strawberry blond, which is similar, he says, to the red hair he had as a child.
The couple recently had to evacuate their house due to its proximity to the Eaton fire; promoting Glory, he says, has felt strange. “So many people who worked on the record, their houses are gone.” Ferocious winds are still blowing around the greenery next to their house, but much of the US is more focused on Trump’s second inauguration, which is happening as we speak. “What a mess,” Hadreas says drily. “I feel I’m seeing a lot more, like, posts about how Melania is “serving”, and the vice-president’s wife was in the style section. I feel like we weren’t doing that last time. That feels a little ominous.”
Dark and roiling, In a Row is one of the few songs on Glory whose origin Hadreas can pinpoint unequivocally. His seventh album, he says, is drawn from a bout of depression he experienced during Covid, as he was promoting his fifth (and most recent vocal-led) album, Set My Heart on Fire Immediately.
From the outside at least, that album was a watershed moment. It received the best reviews of his career, and in interviews he spoke about feeling confident and present (in large part thanks to his experience working on The Sun Still Burns Here, a dance piece with the choreographer Kate Wallich). In the aftermath, he appeared on bills with indie A-listers Tame Impala and Death Cab for Cutie, and was nominated for a Grammy for his 2022 collaboration with Yeah Yeah Yeahs. “The last record, I was very like, manic; all that embodying was really wild,” he says. “Everything was kind of a fallout from that – I think it dug up a lot of stuff, a lot of feelings that were wild and fun until I was left alone with them.”
Living in lockdown, without the constant hamster wheel of writing, performing and promoting music, dredged up emotions he hadn’t had to contend with in a long time, eventually translating to Glory’s haunted ballads and gnashing, 90s-y indie rock songs. “There’s a specific discomfort that I’ve avoided since I was, like, three – like, if I skipped school, I wouldn’t want to go back because I didn’t want to explain [why I was absent]. If I had to do a presentation, I just never went back to that class,” he says. “Being out in the world is really terrifying to me. 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?”
The lead single, It’s a Mirror, presents the most straightforward manifestation of those anxieties: “I still run and hide when a man’s at the door,” he sings, the song building to its claustrophobic maelstrom of a chorus.
“I can sing in front of people for an hour and do 30 body rolls, but then a neighbour will talk to me and I’ll be like” – he adopts a stage whisper – “‘Alan, the neighbour’s here.’ I’m dramatising everything – I talk to the neighbours – but I just feel like … Because I was three when I had a panic attack and felt this specific way, I shouldn’t be having the same feeling in my body now.”
His self-interrogation continued beyond fear and anxiety. One lyric – “Can I get off without reliving history?” – is partly “sexual – like, why am I thinking about the same things to get off that I’ve always thought about? It’s the same dynamics, the same things – I’m kind of sick of it.
“I’m sick of it in general, my mode of being. I’m not 15, well and truly – so why do I think this guy is going to be mean to me? I’m different now, everything’s different now, but I still act like it isn’t. I have a story about everything that I made up a long time ago.”
Hadreas says he accepts that part of this is simply human nature, which is “why I’m trying to be generous, because you can’t really fix it. I know I’m saying all this kind of therapy speaky shit, but it’s not about self-improvement – I don’t care about that. I don’t want to be better. I just want to have more fun, and be kinder.”
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It is understandable, in a sense, that Hadreas would feel so hemmed in by his past – in music, artists’ stories tend to be drawn early on and then chiselled in stone. For Hadreas, that means that much of his press coverage rehashes stuff he was talking about 15 years ago: he was bullied throughout his youth; he was reckless, a party boy, and now he is sober. His early music covered topics such as sexual abuse, suicide and homophobia. “I felt power in sharing all of those things, and so it becomes its own story, even though it’s real,” he says. “In the beginning, I was frustrated, because a lot of times, when people interviewed me, they would talk about how I looked like I was on the verge of tears all the time. I don’t think I ever was; I can’t remember. I was maybe shy, and I’m a little guy, but I was not on the verge of tears. But it’s just how things are.”
He was, and still is, the rare gay man in indie rock. He was the even rarer gay man in indie rock who chose to write about experiences of homophobia, and because of that, his sexuality was often focused on, to the exclusion of all else. (Choice headline around his third album, Too Bright: “Perfume Genius on the weird politics of being a gay artist”.) “It was frustrating, a little bit, how often people talked about queerness and gender, but also I was writing about those things,” he says. “I don’t know – people like gay guys now, don’t you think? People have been thirsting over, like, really faggy guys, and I’m like: ‘OK, I like that.’” He adds that he can perhaps “let go” of some of that focus on his sexuality. (He clarifies: “The guy from the Menendez brothers show, Cooper Koch, I’m literally just talking about him. I’ve seen so many thirst tweets about him, and I love that because he’s so gay.”)
I suggest that culture loving “faggy guys” hasn’t necessarily translated to the indie rock world, where it feels as if there are still very few prominent gay men. “No, but there are a lot of straight ones wearing skirts and stuff, which we support,” he replies, giggling. “If you’re wearing it in the right way. You can tell – I can always tell, you know what I mean? There’s some really gay straight guys, and that’s allowed but it has to be real.”
He continues: “I feel like it’s gone full circle, honestly – gay guys are dressing like they work at the gas station and straight guys are dressing like little ladies. I think that can be fun,” he says. “But also, some of the most gentle, feminine, sweetest men I’ve met have been straight, and some of the most awful, misogynistic, reprehensible men I’ve met have been gay. I hope that’s not the pull quote.”
In the past, Hadreas has said he aims to make the kind of music he would have wanted to hear when he was younger and struggling with his sexuality. That is still true now, he says, but he is looking more broadly, hoping to build out a gay canon that currently over-indexes on stories about youth or untimely death. “I certainly was obsessed with reading all the hustler memoirs and stuff – I like things that are disgusting and fucked up, I like things that are bleak, I pretty much only like that,” he says. But “when I got sober, I went to a gay men’s [AA] meeting, and there were all these older gay men who were being kind to each other and enjoying their lives – this is 20 years ago or something like that – and I remember it being really beautiful to me, and something I hadn’t seen a lot of”.
Glory, of course, is not exactly the rose-tinted portrait of gay middle-age that might imply. Certain songs, such as It’s a Mirror and Left for Tomorrow, deal with the haunting, anxious aftermath of grief, even though they were written before Hadreas had experienced it himself. “A lot of the record has this anticipation of grief – of losing something, or your health, or things changing in a way that you’re not going to be able to deal with,” he says. His beloved chihuahua Wanda, a well-known figure among his fans, died six months after the completion of Glory. “She was bit by a snake and died in front of us. I had never lost something I love so much,” he says. “I only wanted to be safe and happy and everything, and then to have that not be true any more, to have her be gone … I was embarrassed by how rocked I was by that.”
I tell Hadreas that I had thought many of the songs were about Wanda dying. “They are now,” he says. “Left for Tomorrow was sort of about that – I mean, it was more than just my dog, it was my mum, it was about the idea of losing something that is, like, the keeper of all my love. I’m not that generous with love, and I found it really easy to be generous with [my love for] Wanda. It wasn’t guarded, it’s very open, I didn’t get caught up in insecurities. The idea of losing something that keeps all those things … Like, where does it go after that?”
In that light, the title Glory takes on a bittersweet note – the idea that this is just the way life goes, and we have to learn to move on. Hadreas says it refers to the way he would like to accept things the way they are, and appreciate the beauty in them. “It’s about trying to be as much as I can where I am,” he says, while also appreciating “all the things I’ve been carrying this whole time that haven’t changed” – even those that are difficult. “You always want it to be just the beautiful things, but they’re all kind of mixed together.” It isn’t the intense feeling he may have chased for so many years, or the most dramatic one – but it is satisfying all the same.
• Glory is released via Matador Records on 28 March
