Into The Music
Mike Hadreas has been making music as Perfume Genius since 2010, when he released his debut Learning from his mother’s home in Washington state, having moved back after years of difficult living in New York. The record was recorded on GarageBand and uploaded to the internet, and it found its audience through the kind of word-of-mouth that happens when music touches something specific and real in people who needed to hear exactly that.
He’s made six studio albums since then, each one more sonically developed than the last, moving from the stark piano-and-voice of the early records through the orchestral arrangements of Too Bright (2014) and the more experimental and physically visceral work of No Shape (2017) and Set My Heart on Fire Immediately (2020). Glory, released in 2025, is the distillation of everything he’s learned about how to make his particular emotional universe into sound.
He’s a queer artist in the full sense of the term, meaning his work doesn’t just represent queer experience but emerges from it in ways that shape every formal choice he makes. The vulnerability isn’t a pose. The specificity about the body, desire, shame, and love isn’t performed. It comes from somewhere real, and that’s why listeners who have nothing in common with him biographically recognize themselves in the songs.
The ongoing Duo Tour with Alan Wyffels keeps that intimacy intact, two people in a room making the songs happen. Tonight’s show at the First Unitarian in Philadelphia is sold out. The extended version of Glory is out now.
