That record saw him shift from the spare, confessional songs of his first two albums to the lush, sublime, and more rocking realm of chamber-pop. Soaked in sweat and decadence, Ugly Season marks a watershed for Perfume Genius, one nearly as momentous for his career as the release of Too Bright in 2014. This knowledge is embedded in the bones of his latest album, Ugly Season, which was released today. But Hadreas revealed that training to dance-a new artistic endeavor for him-taught him that being more present in the body granted him access to higher spiritual realms in his music.

“For a long time I’ve been obsessed with the idea of transcendence, or, like, leaving the body,” he said. In a Zoom interview six weeks after the show, he told me he has found deeper layers in these themes to explore.

His songs have been about finding holiness through passion (“Slip Away”), summoning strength in the face of homophobia (“Just Like Love”), coping with illness and depression (“Describe ”), and reckoning with aging ( Set My Heart’s haunting opener, “Whole Life”). Reclining in a chair, he lengthened his lithe frame and opened his legs, an offering to the invisible man standing before him-the one who, in the song, remains clothed while undressing the narrator.Īt 40, Hadreas is six albums into a career that has mapped the gay body as a territory of emotional and sensual revelation. On “Jason,” a ballad of seduction, he turned vulnerable, whispering the lyrics in a falsetto.

Throughout the concert at the historic 9:30 Club, Hadreas shape-shifted, yielding himself to the music’s demands. He pitched his voice low and strutted across the stage, charging the room with a current of sexual energy that, to quote a poem by Whitman, “is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists, / It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees.” As Perfume Genius, his stage name, he quickly settled into the lilting groove of “Your Body Changes Everything,” from his acclaimed 2020 album, Set My Heart on Fire Immediately. On a warm, late-March night in Washington, D.C., just a few blocks from where Walt Whitman once visited Union soldiers and wooed his beloved Irish horse-car conductor, Mike Hadreas took the mic for a sold-out show.

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