Perfume Genius's Unknowable Ecstasy

By Matt Mitchell


“To be gorgeous, even from the day you’re place on Earth to the day you perish, is to be gorgeous only briefly,” Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong wrote in his novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Perfume Genius, the performer place on Earth Mike Hadreas, evokes that same emotion onstage. Since his debut, 2010’s Learning, Hadreas has deconstructed the banalities of attraction and attractiveness through human movement, and his catalog is an exclamation on how our bodily prisons can become delicate and powerful. Hadreas’s new album, Ugly Season, which he lovingly refers to as “the dance record,” was written and recorded just before 2020’s Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, nevertheless it is much more akin to the melodrama of a ballet or concerto than that project’s fluttering, beguiling grandeur. Despite the two-year gap between them, the records were originally slated to be released within each year of each other — and the pop alchemy of Immediately was fashioned in response to the method of composing Ugly Season.


“The way we made Ugly Season was a little bit more free,” Hadreas tells MTV News. “I didn’t have any limits or any ideas about process other than I had an energetic place I wanted the songs to go to and I required them to be a certain quantity of time and I wanted them to feel a certain way. I wanted them to be, you know, sort of operatic, although I didn’t care how that was executed.” Hadreas says a lot of the album resulted from improvising with his collaborators, producer/multi-instrumentalist Blake Mills and pianist Alan Wyffels. “But with Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, I wanted to create something a lot more songy along with a lot more pared back. I attempted to do everything with the least quantity of elements possible, which isn't something I thought about Whenever I was making Ugly Season.”


Where Immediately was Hadreas’s most straight-forward record, incorporating nation and disco influences into his pop vernacular, Ugly Season is much more experimental and worldly. It is as inspired by Bulgarian women’s choirs as it is Irish New Age icon Enya and Lebanese singer Fairuz. There really are instrumental stretches of opulent strings harmonizing like intersecting gusts of wind and sermons of chambered vocals pressing against ambient space. Ugly Season was originally attached to “The Sun Still Burns Here,” his collaborative dance recital with artist Kate Wallich that Hadreas calls “a movement language” and also a “utopian, sex culty” thing made up of patient, mystifying choreography. The show premiered in October 2019 at The Moore Theatre in Seattle and ran through January 2020 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. “I love to move in slow motion. I don’t know if it’s habitually really exhilarating to watch, nevertheless it feels good to me,” he adds, laughing. “The thing I was attempting to do the most, or what I thought about the most, was attempting to create something spiritual or almost religious.”


although Ugly Season and Immediately are dichotomous, they share a character. “Jason,” Hadreas’s catch-all pseudonym for some of the males in his life and imagination, arrives under different disguises. On Immediately, he’s a straight man having one-night stands with gay men; on Ugly Season’s “Hellbent,” he’s a drug dealer. Hadreas doesn’t know how to explain why he keeps talking to different Jasons in his music, attributing that uncertainty to why his Substack newsletter about process and creation didn’t pan out. “I realized I have no idea how to explain it,” he adds. “I can energetically feel all of the reasons and I feel very smart and educated and patient as soon as I’m picking words and picking notes, however Once I attempt to explain it, I can’t. I think that’s why I made [Jason], because I don’t know how to explain it in any other way.”


Ugly Season is a conduit for Hadreas’s unknowable ecstasy and, despite its title, is his preservation of the eruptive, pirouetting motions that come with it. The record is bold and insular, and there’s something very innate nevertheless otherworldly about the imagery it conjures. Just like his and Wallich’s dance, Hadreas’s album vision necessitates visually reckoning with his own body and others’, offering deft commentary on how they intertwine and recoil. The sparse, glittering jangle of “Pop Song” chronicles two stretching, breathing bodies becoming one; “Eye in the Wall” fashions a haunted, sprawling arrangement into a cinematic ode to the components of someone else’s frame, rendering Hadreas as “full of nothing yet love.”


In his live performances, Hadreas is usually moving, improvising, and shifting. “[During the dance], I could be rolling around and I would come into contact with some feeling that I’ve been carrying around and I didn’t even know,” he adds. “You just become so used to the stories you tell yourself about yourself. You go to sleep so you wake up with them totally intact. You just don’t even question it, and also you really should — because they’re typically lies. Some days the songs are like, ‘What if I was really into that? What if that was hot? Whichever darkness I feel, what if I was harnessing it alternatively opposed to being haunted by it?’”


Stripping down emotionally in his work, Hadreas deconstructs himself to a molecular level artistically, pondering how he can give parts of himself away. It takes shape on his album covers just as much as his songs. Too Bright is a gender-fluid portrait of the singer. No Shape features him missing a pant leg. Set My Heart on Fire Immediately finds him shirtless. Ugly Season is a very naked and surreal rendering of his upper body, an indiscernible, almost “hideous,” image. “It’s heavy,” Hadreas says. “My time is spent thinking really awful things about myself. It’s physical, like I can feel [the] energy.” On his androgynous 2014 anthem “Queen,” he flips that hate and reshapes it into a tough, kaleidoscopic moment of pleasure and ego. On Immediately, he embodies the burdens of his own humanism and of how our bodies covet. On Ugly Season, he’s falling in love with the abstract glamour of being hideous.


That concept was captured in a companion short film by the artist Jacolby Satterwhite, who also created the film accompaniment for Solange’s When I Get Home. The two met over the phone in early 2020 and discovered their shared interest in presenting emotions in media that extend in back of music. The result of their group effort is a portrait of utopian memory and an attempt at visualizing immense, inarticulable desires by means of the movement of bodies, a grand emphasis on the sensual story Hadreas tells during Ugly Season. “I just really love what [Satterwhite] does and I really trust him,” Hadreas says. “I trusted that he would understand where I’m coming from without really having to explain it.”


The day before we discussed, Hadreas spent an afternoon at a photo shoot. Despite being a performer whose live act is so tethered to a contorting body vulnerably laid bare, that openness isn’t second nature to him. Nevertheless the confidence he displays isn't so much forced for the camera as it is another extension of his Perfume Genius persona. “It’s not that I feel willing to get my picture taken, or that I even deserve to, or that I’m hot enough to be the focus of a photo shoot,” Hadreas notes. “When I got there, I determined to feel that way. It’s the same Whenever I perform. I’m not super comfortable, some days, wearing the things that I wear or doing the things I do or talking about the things I mention before I go onstage. However any time I’m onstage, I have made a choice to be comfortable and attempt to be more comfortable than anybody else.”


“Bitch, it’s ugly season, and I love it,” Hadreas sings gently on the title track. Narratively, the album is a familiar landscape, as Hadreas transcribes misanthropies laced with joyous spurts of queer euphoria. He tracks his own grief, of both unrequited love and self-doubt, and spirals them into paeans of tender confidence. Perfume Genius isn't a monolithic character, however a channel for Hadreas to center and release parts of himself — the parts he writhes away onstage every night. He leaves a starting for his crowds to do the same. It’s a communal embellishment of confidence, a purging of doubts, a ballet reconfigured every night. “It’s a little bit battle against myself, although I also think of it as a portal for other people,” he adds. “I hope that’s categorize kind of empowering, or that I just wish to feel hot for a hour.”