Mike Hadreas, who records music as Perfume Genius, grew up in the Seattle suburbs in the nineteen-eighties and early nineties, as a hammy kid who loved to dance and never wanted to talk about anything serious. Then, in his early adolescence, the world closed in around him. He was the only openly gay student at his high school, and he was feminine; football players spat on him and beat him up. He spent a lot of time “standing outside smoking and weeping,” he told the Times, in 2014. In his senior year, he dropped out of high school. He briefly attended Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts, where, for one project, he took apart VCRs and hung the parts from the ceiling, and, for another, made paintings with his own blood and pubic hair. When he was twenty-one, he was attacked, while walking down the street, by a group of young men who had jumped out of a car. The assault sent him to the hospital. After convalescing, he moved to New York City, and found an idiosyncratic queer community; he began to relax into himself again. He worked the door at the Alphabet Lounge, in the East Village, and his euphoric, young-in-New York partying escalated into a dependency on drugs and alcohol. At twenty-five, he moved back to the Pacific Northwest, went to rehab, and began writing songs, which he posted on MySpace, where they attracted a following. By the time his début album, “Learning,” was released, in 2010, he had started partying again. A friend introduced him to a scruffy, handsome pianist named Alan Wyffels, who brought him to A.A. meetings and began accompanying him at his shows. Sober and unguarded, the two fell in love.
Hadreas is now thirty-eight, and his fifth album, “Set My Heart on Fire Immediately,” comes out on Friday. Its cover bears a black-and-white photograph of Hadreas, shirtless, in utility pants, his skin streaked with dirt—the ultra-masculinity of the image revised by the tenderness and vulnerability that radiates from Hadreas’s uncertain eyes and wiry form. He has built a universe with his music: a witchy, baroque fantasy landscape where a stranger might appear out of nowhere, wreathed in flowers or sunlight or iron chains. Hadreas’s voice quavers, sliding from a falsetto to a low, fifties croon. The first two Perfume Genius albums were sparse and studied, with most songs built from just Hadreas’s voice and a piano. On his third and fourth albums, Hadreas muscled into more ambitious territory: his sound was layered, lush, shimmery and shuddering, with moments of aural sublimity underlined by allusions to decay and death. His lyrics sometimes include autobiographical snapshots: “Mr. Peterson,” a track from “Learning,” depicts a doomed relationship with a teacher; “Alan,” the final song on his last album, captures a moment of tenuous domestic bliss. Hadreas naturally works in contrasting registers: he delivers sounds that are rooted in sadness and reaching toward joy. (If you skip the lyrics, you might even miss the sadness: “Dark Parts,” a song about his mother’s experiences of sexual abuse, was once licensed for commercials by Toyota and ESPN.)
He’s also popular on Twitter, where he displays a ready, cheeky sense of humor that doesn’t frequently show through his music’s velvet curtains. Lately, in between memes about his new album and links to the National Domestic Workers Alliance COVID-19 caregiver-relief fund, Hadreas has been posting dramatic footage of Japanese macaques soaking in a hot spring and photos of rats tenderly sniffing wildflowers. (His Twitter feed, too, finds fuel in contrasts.) We spoke in early April, over Zoom. In a different timeline, Hadreas would have been gearing up for a nationwide tour with Tame Impala. Instead, he was doing press interviews from his bedroom, where a tiny staircase leads up to the bed, for the convenience of his chihuahua, Wanda. He and Wyffels moved, in 2018, from suburban Washington to a two-bedroom house in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles; their second bedroom serves as a combination studio, gym, and office, and their living room is cozy—full of flea-market paintings, plants, pillows, and rugs. When we talked, Hadreas was sitting in his apartment, wearing a faded T-shirt printed with a photo of Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix from a scene in “My Own Private Idaho.” Lately, Hadreas had been leaving the house only to take Wanda on walks in the ninety-degree spring heat. We spoke again, on the phone, later in the month. The conversations have been combined, condensed, and edited.
What is it like to release an album during quarantine?
Oh, it’s so weird. Promoting a record requires a performance, in some way—it requires this outward-facing version of me. But quarantine makes me very deep in the inward version. Like, right now, I’m in my bed, where normally we would be doing this in person. I would have put something nice on. I would wash, you know what I mean? I’m supposed to feel out, and I feel very in. And everyone’s just going nuts. My friends are FaceTiming me, and they basically look feral, and I kind of feel that I’m feral, too, but then I’ll get an e-mail where a magazine needs me to take a full-body selfie against a blank wall or something, and it’s just me with my tripod, trying to figure out how to have some energy in my bedroom.
What are you hearing from friends in the music industry about how they’re handling this?
Everyone’s kind of hiding and waiting. Everyone seems to be saying, “Well, I guess things are postponed for a while,” knowing full well that maybe these tours are never going to happen—or, at the very least, it’ll be a long time—and touring is the way you make a significant amount of your money. I don’t have a handle on it, and I don’t think anyone else does, either.
Are you having any specific quarantine fantasies?
I get on the Internet and look at houses with back yards, houses in the desert, places where I could run back and forth, where other people could be there with me. I want space, and I want people. I think I’m missing being silly and stupid and outside.
I’m fantasizing about shows I wanted to go to, and opening a menu at a restaurant during the dinner rush, and dive-bar karaoke. Do you have a karaoke song?
I’m really bad at karaoke, but “Toxicity,” by System of a Down, I think is the most successful I’ve ever been. I tried to do the Macklemore song about gay marriage once. I don’t know if I executed it, but the concept was good.
What about touring do you miss?
Getting out of myself. To be vibing off actual vibes, not just ones that I’ve pulled from the air. It takes a lot for me to really pay attention to what’s around me. My old pattern is to be kind of detached, to be avoidant of the present. I’ll stay in the same place internally, even though the circumstances around me will change.
You’ve talked before about being shown, as a teen-ager, a very fixed idea of who you were—an idea that, for a while, prevented you from seeing how you’d changed, and how the world was changing. You’ve also said that your music is becoming less about the past and more about the present. Is that old idea of yourself still hanging around? How continuous do you feel now with who you were at thirteen, or twenty-one?
I think I feel all those phases less now than I used to, and consciously so. I think I felt, for a long time, like I had to keep them all heavy on my mind to try to warm them up and soften them and make them feel better. And I don’t really need to feel like I need to do that anymore.
But it’s still a new and strange idea for me: trying to let my present self be the thing that I warm and soften, the thing that feels good. I feel—or, at least, I felt, before all of this started—like I’m in the middle of one of the shifts that will come in my life, where I just suddenly feel like a different person. I started making music because of one of these shifts, which came with the process of getting sober and just being, like, “Oh, I’m an asshole!” Really accepting that idea, really coming to terms with the fact that I couldn’t just make it go away.
Does the practice of sobriety overlap much with your artistic practice?
Probably more than I would be aware of. I think the core thing that got me healthy was a spiritual allowance to be uncomfortable—to just sit in it, and not scramble to soothe myself, or escape in a dangerous way, or in an easy way. Music gave me a way to make that scramble more purposeful or helpful. When I’m writing, I feel kinder, and wiser. I feel that all the things that I thought made me a bad person can help me be compassionate and observant.
But, then, I’ve been wondering: Why is writing the only time I feel that? Maybe I shifted too much toward work being the singular thing. It’s kind of not working for me anymore. It makes me feel less sober, realizing how enmeshed I am with my work as a driving force. I reserve all my goodness, all my patience, for the things that I make. And then, if I’m not working, then I’m just, like, kind of irritable and sitting down.
It was dance that blew up this separation between my work and the world, between my work and other people. It blew up this idea that I had to be detached, internal, solitary, to make things. It changed my writing. I started thinking in terms of stories, of physical settings, of real people, not just of ideas.
You’re talking about “The Sun Still Burns Here,” the collaboration you did with the choreographer Kate Wallich. I understand she got in touch with you after seeing a photo of you arching your back, on Instagram.
It was so collaborative—everyone was in the room before we had made even a little bit of music. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to create anything with all these other people around, but then I was. I thought, Well, maybe my life can be more like this. Maybe I can let some more people into this whole thing, and maybe it can be enjoyable. That was another new thing—this idea that working could feel good. Not that I don’t like what I do, but it always feels hard, or anxiety-producing. Dance was different.
You’ve always written about the body, about expressing things through the body. Did dance change your relationship with embodiment?
What I used to do onstage, before I worked with Kate, was just throwing myself around a lot. It felt very rebellious against my body.
Rebellious against your sense of comfort?
I used to just wear huge clothes in real life—just, like, a big tent, with just my little face at the top. But, then, onstage, I would not be wearing a shirt. For an hour, it was, like, Well, fuck you, whatever makes me think that I need to wear the tent. I’m going to take my shirt off. I was still anxious about performing, still shy, but I wanted to be ferocious. But there was nothing very patient or warm about that.
Doing this dance was different. I was doing really slow extensions of my arms, really considered movements. I was really hyper-present with myself, not just fully out and slamming around.
The music on the new album is like that, too—there’s a sense of things being controlled as much as they’re being unleashed. But you also return to transcendence and self-erasure—there are lines on this album about letting your life drift and wash away, about running toward the light. I’m curious what the idea of transcendence means to you.
A sublime quietness. A wash of “I’m where I’m supposed to be.” A sense of everything, of a soup where everything can shift and exist and move, and the whole thing is warm and quiet.
I think that’s why I freaked out with the dance. I was feeling like that in my body, but with people. I thought that warmth and quietness meant I would be a brain in a tank, and I would just upload whatever I was thinking to the Internet or something, just be completely—
Disembodied. I think about that all the time.
But it turns out I can get that feeling by being super bodied. Very weird to me.
Your drive toward transcendence, toward that warm void—how much of that is a desire for oblivion?
Like a death-wish kind of thing?
Is it possible to be attracted to the void without the death drive entering the picture? I’ll say that this question is coming from a personal place.
I guess I’m starting to realize that I can be. I want to stay here and feel everything, not just the oblivion. That’s what I thought that freedom was, and I actively pursued that when I was younger, whether I knew it or not. And maybe I’m becoming O.K. with just being at the edge, feeling the reach for it. I’m starting to realize that the reach is really what I want.
Your Twitter presence, which is funny and absurd, is usually talked about as separate from your music, which is so heartfelt, but, to me, they are often expressing the same thing—the fact that we’re stuck in these individual bodies, with our accumulating baggage, when actual existence often seems to be on a totally different plane. There’s this disconnect that is maybe best expressed either with extreme sincerity or with nonsense.
I was recently obsessed with this video of an orangutan using a saw—I found it on one of those nights when Alan was asleep and I was on YouTube, restless, looking for something, with the volume turned down. I kept posting the orangutan and sending it to people and saying, “Look, it’s me,” and they would laugh, and I would let them laugh and feel jokey, but I was tearing up.
There’ve been a lot of rat pictures on your Twitter lately.
I guess there’s something there to unpack. There’s a mouse howling at the moon that I love. It’s such a little mouse, but he’s harnessing so much, and conjuring so much. I really, you know, believe I’m the mouse. I always feel that way about little animals. Like my dog—she’s really little, but she’s really, really strong. I always want little things to be respected for their power.
You’ve been laying music over video lately—a demo of yours over documentary footage of snow monkeys in a hot spring, Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” over a clip of a halftime entertainer doing a handstand with a chihuahua balanced on his feet.
I’m really into figure-skating falls right now. I’ll edit them so you don’t see the fall—you just see the aftermath, where they’re just lying on the ice. And then I will slow it down by, like, eighty per cent, until they’re just pressed in the ice, until every little movement she makes feels choreographed, and then I’ll put some cooing over it. I’m dead serious about these videos. There’s a weird therapeutic aspect to it, maybe because I can’t dance right now.
Your albums follow a clear emotional trajectory. The first two are inward, meditative, heartbreaking; the third turns outward, into sharper edges, moments of brashness; and then the last album was so rapturous; and this album feels recalibrated, modulated toward more stability. Has your personal evolution mirrored the evolution of your sound?
Yes, but after the fact. I feel like every record is kind of aspirational. I thought about the last album, “No Shape,” as my big American rock album, but that was more how I wanted to be—liberated and free. I was reaching for those feelings, singing about them. And now I feel more like I have those feelings and what I’m reaching for is patience, safety. What’s aspirational about this record is that it doesn’t feel spun out.
There’s a lot more distortion on it—the first single, “Describe,” has this crunchy, nineties-rock sound. What was different, process-wise, about producing this album?
The last record was more layered: it would start with just me and an instrument, and then over time we would add a shitload of stuff. With this one, me and my producer Blake [Mills] wanted the record to be more live-feeling—we wanted to start with as much as possible, all at the same time. So we played all together, with the same group of musicians, for all the songs.
And I wrote that way—I imagined I was singing to someone, or singing to people, in a way that was different than I used to. For “Just a Touch,” I imagined a wartime story, the idea of giving this song to someone who was going away, and that they could sing the melody to remember. A lot of queer relationships were like that—they had to exist in secret, they had to be these brief, frantic, passionate explosions, and then afterward you would only have a memory to sustain it.
Like the page number in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.”
Oh, I haven’t seen it! Do you ever do that thing where you just know a movie is going to be the perfect thing for you, but you don’t actually watch it? You just wait, for no reason—
I love doing that—with books, especially. I think it’s about saving things for a moment when you’ll be able to reciprocate some part of what they’re giving you.
Oh, good. Alan’s, like, “Why don’t you just watch it?”
I bet you’ll be glad you waited. Do you think about how you want your music to make people feel?
I want them to feel the freedom I feel when I make a song where two things exist at the same time, things I thought I had to pick between. Like extreme sadness and extreme hope, or the desire to access something and the realization that there may be nothing there. I mean, it doesn’t fix anything or solve anything, but it just makes you feel less lonely. That’s what I hope people feel: that something unspoken, something hard to articulate, some tension, has been understood for four minutes. There’s something about sharing any sensation, even the deepest bleakness, that makes it less bleak.
Your music makes people feel cared for, I think—it gives people a sense of possibility. What’s the music that makes you feel the way that you want your music to feel.
I’ve been listening to Townes Van Zandt a lot, because he’s so resigned and accepting of things, and I don’t really feel like that. I feel like I’m just so, I don’t know, not resigned. So he’s talking about how everything’s horrible, in a plainspoken way, with all this acceptance, and that’s been comforting to me. I also love Enya or Cocteau Twins, where I can’t understand a word they’re saying and they’re pulling a thread that does not exist in the real world but is still so satisfying.
What makes you feel cared for?
I’m obsessed with this idea right now of wanting someone to care for me without me having to explain it or tell them what I’m feeling. I just want them to guess and know. This is a fight that I’ve been having with Alan a lot, where I’m sort of angling toward him, with a feeling, being, like, “I’m not going to tell you what it is, but please make me feel better.” And that does not work. I’m so desperate for that right now, and I am not paying attention to my part in that desire or dynamic. I just want to be babied, but I don’t want to say how or why. I just want it to happen.
That kind of asymmetry is more natural in our relationship with music than it is in our relationship with another person, right? With music, you can just sit there—you don’t have to tell it what you need. Music often tells you what you need before you know. But I think everyone wants to be babied by someone, and we also want to be able to give people that when they need it. Someone recently tweeted, “I’m high so I’ll say this: I wish I could hold my friends as babies.”
That would be really good.
Yeah. I would love to do that.
Me, too.
Do you find it reductive or, on the other hand, do you find it essential for your music to be classified as queer art?
It’s both. It’s always both. It’s essential to me; I don’t have a problem with that classification. But I know that other people do, and I don’t want that to be a barrier to me being able to have other people listen to it, or just to financially be able to continue making stuff. It’s confusing. Part of my response is totally selfish. But I think people think listening to my music is some sort of cultural decision, like, “I am listening to a gay artist.” With other music, you don’t have that. And then, at the same time, being a queer musician is very important to me.
One of my colleagues wrote a piece recently where he articulated this feeling—of suddenly being a black person in a diverse space rather than a black person in a white space, and experiencing the freedom to no longer signify. But the desire to no longer signify is complicated.
It’s even leaked into my daily life. I just want to grab ten people and move somewhere—buy a big ranch and just make our own world. But then I’m leaving behind a bunch of people that don’t have the luxury of leaving. And I feel I need to stay and be helpful to the people that can’t just go to the desert and roll around with me.
That scene is basically depicted in the “Describe” video, which you directed. You also directed the video for “On the Floor,” and both of them have this sunlit, late-afternoon, apocalypse-paradise atmosphere to them.
I wanted that warmth, a feeling of nostalgia, something old and earthy. But I also wanted it to be off—that you couldn’t put your finger on exactly what time it is, or where I am. I felt that the music was the same way. I was kind of inhabiting classic ideas, classic ways of singing, but there was something hazy underneath it. I was trying to meet those two things: dirt and space.
You channel this Roy Orbison, Elvis-y sound in a few songs on the album: you’re singing lower in your vocal range, luxuriating in it, and the instrumentation is structured around these classic fifties-style arpeggios. But, as you say, there’s something just a little off. It made me think of your “Can’t Help Falling in Love” cover—how it’s so romantic, but it also has an ominous, industrial undertone. What draws you to that sort of Americana?
That’s music I’ve listened to my whole life, from when I was a little kid until now, even if there was never exactly room for me in it. If there was ever any outsider-y weirdness in that music, it was always between the lines—or, they couldn’t be explicit, really, about anything.
But there was a swagger to some of that singing, and a way of being ultra-vulnerable, while still maintaining this confidence and command. Like Elvis singing “Unchained Melody,” how over-the-top that is—how performative, how intense, and how distant, somehow, too. And “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” by the Platters. There’s such a haunting dreaminess to this music, and such a simplicity, and yet there’s so much there.
When I started making music, songs like these were especially satisfying. I thought, If you can make a song with so few ingredients, I’m going to try. Now I can make things a little more complicated, but I still sometimes crave a song with just three chords and two things going on.
When I was little, I had this idea that “Unchained Melody” and “I Love You Always Forever,” by Donna Lewis, were the two perfect songs that existed—that they were in some way the purest possible expressions of music.
I agree.
Oh, my therapist is FaceTiming me.
I just have two more questions. I was moved by the aesthetic of the “Describe” video—the freedom in it, and also the sense that we were at the end of things.
I didn’t want that to be super overt, but it was definitely like something went down. And I hope that something doesn’t have to go down for me to find these things—that warmth, that communal feeling. I’m constantly watching postapocalyptic movies and TV shows. Part of me is always wondering if I can make some kind of new world for myself while this one still exists.
You’ve talked about choosing to make a song hopeful. If the openness on this album is aspirational, is it something you are also willing yourself toward in the rest of your life? And what does that mean, on a day-to-day basis?
I guess I just feel like I deserve that hope. I deserve goodness, even though there were a lot of people telling me I didn’t, or even if the world is not really set up for me to easily get it, or even if what I want is weird, or it doesn’t make sense. I know, before the world got to me, what I wanted and how it was. I know that I was good. I just have the idea that I’m not, and I’m fighting against this idea all the time. And I can see it in other people—I can see it in the way the world is built for people to feel unsafe. There are so many systems that are gross and violent and don’t help. But, for some reason, I’m dedicated to pushing through it. There is still, no matter what, a feeling that I have a right to be here.
