Perfume Genius
Glory
MATADOR
ABOVE THE CURRENT
It’s been over two months since Mike Hadreas released the debut single from his latest Perfume Genius record, Glory. After dozens of listens, a handful of views of the accompanying music video, and a thorough read-through of the lyrics sheet, I remain as delightfully baffled and utterly floored as the first time I’d heard it. Structurally interesting, pristinely produced, utterly tactile, and yet tantalizingly obscure, Hadreas is just absolutely cooking. If “It’s a Mirror” isn’t my favorite song of 2025, it’s close, but beyond that is a marvel of top-down brilliance, an album that remains as slippery, electrifying, and brilliantly unknowable as its lead single.
A significant amount of this brilliance can be attributed to the incredible team Hadreas has built around himself, providing ideal shading to his meandering, delicate folk-pop stylings. Guitarists Meg Duffy and Greg Uhlmann, drummers Tim Carr and Jim Keltner, and bassist Pat Kelly provide backing to songs written by Hadreas with the assistance of his longtime “partner in life and songcraft,” Alan Wyffels. All of this is then funneled through the mind of fellow songwriter and producer Blake Mills (who somehow found time to produce both Lucy Dacus and Japanese Breakfast’s new records, as well). Hadreas has talked about the effect this team has had on him as an artist and performer, though this time around they work their way into the most nascent stages of his songwriting routine. Many of the songs on Glory were penned in a way that not only allowed input but necessitated it, leaving ample room for his band to follow flights of fancy as they desired.
A song like “Clean Heart,” with its full embrace of Hadreas’ baroque-pop instincts and a multiple-front barrage of percussion, feels distinctly aided by the backing band as well as by Mills’ ability to sustain cohesion among all the chaos. The entirety of Glory is like that, really: threatening mayhem while maintaining something quite the opposite. Hadreas’ continued ascension as an artist of near-limitless ability has been on display for quite a while now. This, his seventh record, somehow manages to be the best within a discography that has—excepting maybe the more ancillary and experimental Ugly Season—leveled up with each new installment. Perfume Genius is truly a 360 degree entity now, a musical project that uses avenues like album artwork, music videos, and performance as companion pieces to an extremely well-rendered vision. It's something that can begin to feel massive to wrestle with.
The 11 songs on Glory are in near constant conversation with one another, a technique that Hadreas has cited as “abstract” while remaining “very personal.” I could slide my proverbial glasses up the bridge of my nose and attempt to analyze the lines “Bolts of white iris tenderize sobs from the silo” or “Better days, nothing touch me / Light it breaks on the wings of a dove,” or the way a simple qualifier (“down”) comes to contextualize the “mirror” of the record’s lead single, but that feels antithetical to the experience Hadreas and company are trying to create. Both the aforementioned “It’s a Mirror” as well as “No Front Teeth” (which features a wonderful vocal turn from Aldous Harding) work best because of this sort of unknowability. Both, too, devolve from more straightforward folk-pop fare into something almost foreboding and deranged as they hurtle toward their ends.
These are two of countless moments in which Glory surprises. It’s a number that continues to grow with each listen because it refuses to be wrangled into something particularly easy or forthright. As frustrating as this might sound, the buy-in comes easier than one might expect—but once you’re in, it just might become one of your favorite records of the year, too.
