Perfume Genius released Set My Heart on Fire Immediately in 2020, and it remains one of the cleaner examples of an artist arriving fully at what they had been building toward for a decade. Mike Hadreas has always made music that was technically pop and emotionally overwhelming, and this album found the balance between those two qualities more precisely than anything before it.

The earlier records, Learning and Put Your Back N 2 It, were skeletal and raw in ways that were affecting but also narrow. Too Bright in 2014 was the first indication that Hadreas was interested in scale. No Shape in 2017 pushed further into orchestral territory. Set My Heart on Fire Immediately arrived as the logical destination of that progression, an album that was simultaneously his biggest production and his most emotionally precise.

The production, handled with Blake Mills, is layered and physical in ways that most pop music avoids. Songs shift register and tempo without announcement. The string arrangements serve the emotional content rather than decorating it. And Hadreas’s voice, which has always been one of the more technically interesting instruments in contemporary pop, is given space to do things that quieter or more restrained production would have hidden.

Set My Heart on Fire Immediately is an album about the body, about desire and shame and the specific experience of being in a physical self that society has spent a long time trying to make you ashamed of. It handles that subject with neither sentimentality nor anger, which is harder than either approach.