It has been five long years since the last Perfume Genius album. (This isn’t counting 2022’s Ugly Season, which collected work originally composed as accompaniment for Kate Wallich’s contemporary dance piece The Sun Still Burns Here.) To hear Mike Hadreas tell it, the half-decade gap makes a lot of sense. It wasn’t just extensive touring accompanying Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, an album that had built on breakthroughs and experiments to become Hadreas’ biggest, boldest, most varied work to that point. Amidst all that, he also battled a heavy depression during the pandemic, and the music that we now hear on Glory was wrangling not only with that specific trial but also the ways in which we dwell and contort and spiral over various existential quandaries as we age.

You can imagine that the songs on Glory required patience and some degree of delicacy. The album’s 11 tracks don’t just catalog some of Hadreas’ darker thoughts, they expand those into questions about grief, death, loss, how we become the way we are, and how we can become the something else we want to be. Written on piano to leave room for contributions from his band, Glory is often restrained and hushed compared to the more obviously cathartic bursts on No Shape or Set My Heart. But as we’ve come to expect at this point in Perfume Genius’ career, Hadreas’ songwriting — along with contributions from his partner Alan Wyffels and producer Blake Mills — is pristine, exact, deeply honest. On first listens, Glory is a far more melancholic and unresolved collection of songs than the last few Perfume Genius albums, but it leaves the listener with a space in which to navigate their own questions of where we came from and where we’re going.

Ahead of Glory’s release, Hadreas and I got on a call to talk through how it all came together. Now that you can hear it for yourself, read along below for the story behind each song on Perfume Genius’ gorgeous new album.

1. “It’s A Mirror”

The quote that accompanied “It’s A Mirror,” about waking up and having to spend the day regulating your thoughts, felt all too relatable these days. It reminded me of how “Describe” worked as the lead single/opener on Set My Heart On Fire Immediately — like things sort of open at a low point.

MIKE HADREAS: That song has the most plainspoken mission statement of the record. It’s a soup of all the things I was thinking about the last few years, the things I ended up talking about across the album. I like when things are loud, big, but the sentiment is what some people would think of as softer, more tender. That tension is satisfying to me.

This talks about a daily feeling of being disregulated, but the whole album was born from a pandemic-era depression.

HADREAS: The most unshakeable one I’ve had as an adult. I have a lot of ambient things that are constant to the point where they just feel like me. But this one was fully a weight on me that I couldn’t shake. It ended up coming out in all kinds of side ways because I couldn’t reckon with it. I was really scared of the plane all the sudden. Really intrusive thoughts about things happening to Alan or my mom. Feeling really mortal and fragile personally, and then the world feeling that way too. I think because of all the ambient stuff it’s clear it’s chemical, but then when there’s all this impending stuff that’s real, it compounded it. It made it hard to sort through what was me, what was appropriate or not. What was something I needed to think about, what was the wrong spiral.

When you say the record came from that, are these songs that you wrote to get out of that space, or are they reflecting back on that time?

HADREAS: Some of it is making fun of it. Some of it is “What if I just stopped trying to figure it out and just went into it.” I think the thing I was really craving was a humility inside of it. All that spiraling… it took me a long time to realize that’s a form of selfishness. Just because I’m thinking really bad about myself, I thought “That’s not ego.” But it is. It makes you really withheld. It makes you disconnect and disengage, which is not generous to everyone around you. I was craving not a solution but a grace inside of it. A perspective shift.

2. “No Front Teeth” (Feat. Aldous Harding)

HADREAS: Aldous and I have been friends since we toured together in Australia like 10 years ago. I’m obsessed with her, and I think she’s obsessed with me. I hope so, anyway. [Laughs] It’s rare to be really into someone’s work and then also be close personally. Sometimes those can season each other. The more you know someone the less you can invest in the thing they do. Not in a rude way. It can dissipate some of the magic because you know the BTS of it. But that hasn’t happened with her.

I could hear her really clearly when I sang that chorus. She has a clarity to her but with a directional energy, but it’s also unhinged and complicated. Just standing and singing and all this ambient insanity. I also knew that when I finished the lyrics, it felt like instincts or sentiments we shared. It felt like a perfect 360 collaboration.

Another indie fave who plays on the record is Meg Duffy, and then you have this band you were writing with in mind more than in the past.

HADREAS: I wrote a lot of these songs on the piano because I was leaving room for the band. These songs felt like something we were going to sonically create together within this framework. I’ve been inspired by the whole band. It’s felt very different than my early shows where I was too nervous to be present. With the band, I really feel connected to them. It’s the lineup we toured the last record with. Each night is different; I can feel all the energy in the thing we’re creating together. It only exists for that time we did it.

The songs are abstract, but they’re very personal. I felt very vulnerable sharing these things, especially because they’re still happening. It’s not like I’m on the other side of it. Having to translate that can be scary, but I know all the band members really well and they all have the ability to inhabit the world but play with their own charisma.

3. “Clean Heart”

HADREAS: The older I get, the more I realize a lot of the things I’m spiraling about are pretty universal. They’re not unique to me. And it’s just about dying, or like when you’re in therapy and they want to talk about your parents and you’re ashamed your problems are that normal. [Laughs] It makes it feel very human, very shared. I’m talking a lot about the fragility of things, how temporary things are. There’s another side to that heartbreaking part that’s really beautiful and tender. I was trying to access that with this song. I’m saying all this and it’s not like I feel all that. I do when I’m making the song, or I’m trying to. But it’s not something I have most of the time. Most of it’s darker. That song, it’s really kind of life-affirming, even though it’s about dying.

You’ve called this one of your most “confessional” works.

HADREAS: It’s kind of everything. In a way it feels more vulnerable and organic, but it also feels very considered. I was revising my lyrics a lot more. I was thinking in a zoomed-out way about everything in a way I didn’t in the beginning. I was craving the way I wrote when I first started. I love the lyrics from the first two records. A lot of that was because there was less pressure. Some of that grace I was craving, that lesser degree of self-consciousness, was just built in then by nature of it being the beginning.

How do I hold all those things at once? Keep those things I’ve learned, but still go back to that other place. I used to think those things would cancel each other out. If I had a lot of feedback I’d lose the tenderness, because I’d gotten swayed by someone else’s ideas. I’ve made a lot of records. I’ve played a lot of shows. People disagree with me in the studio or they love it. But it all ends up something I’m proud of, so maybe I can hold more of that.

4. “Me & Angel”

This song is a tribute to Alan.

HADREAS: That one came out fully-formed. He was out of town, it was pretty late at night, and I think I was playing video games for hours. I got up and that song just came out, with the lyrics and everything. Sometimes I write with placeholder gibberish, but this one came out so easily that I was like “Wait, is this any good?” [Laughs]

When you’re with someone for a long time, there’s a way you want to think about them that’s hard. There’s a generosity and a kindness that’s hard to do because, it sucks, but the closer you are to people the more you just say it anyway. There’s no filter. If I’m in a bad mood, he’s going to know. I’ll hide it from everyone else, but he’ll know. But then when he’s sleeping and he looks so sweet I’m like, “Wait, I love you!” [Laughs] Plus, I can be very disconnected and in my own head. I’ll be thinking about people a lot but not telling them that. Thinking about how much I love people but not calling them. Sometimes I think I write songs just to be like, “This is what I’ve been thinking about you this whole time.”

5. “Left For Tomorrow”

One thread on this album is “anticipating” grief.

HADREAS: It doesn’t feel like an idea anymore. It’s in my body now as the truth. When you’re young, you somehow think you can avoid it or it’s not going to touch you. I’m lucky enough to have not lost anybody close to me. Especially because I can be really avoidant and scared of big feelings, I don’t really give them out that much — even good ones, because they overwhelm me. But Alan, my mom, Wanda, they’re these keepers of all of them. The idea something could happen to them… how could I even survive that? I’d have to recalibrate everything, because they’re sort of the key to it.

I love that this song fades in and fades out, almost as if it never started or stopped. It was infinite but this is just a slice of it. It’s about a lot of things. It’s about if I could talk to someone after they left and ask questions. What happens to them, what happens to me. When I watch horror movies, I feel calm, because it’s finally happening. When I’m on the plane, I’m terrified of turbulence, but when it’s really really bad I’m like, “I’ve been preparing for this!” Now it’s just happening.

6. “Full On”

HADREAS: It’s kind of cheeky but also really sincere. I was thinking about this specific archetype of masculinity that I’ve been drawn to, disgusted by, but then attracted to. That I intellectually don’t want to engage with but that my body wants validation from. That weird combination of things.

I was thinking of when men get sick and they’re like, non-functional because they have a cold and can’t do two things at once. They’re on the ground coughing, and I feel a sense of power because I can take care of them or because I’m able to manage. Even when a guy is really casanova-y and he thinks he’s… I think it’s cute. It’s transparent to me that it’s all put on. But that’s kind of endearing to me, and it makes me feel powerful that I can see through it but I’m still attracted to it.

7. “Capezio”

This is the same Jason we glimpsed before on Set My Heart On Fire Immediately.

HADREAS: It’s a dynamic you have with someone where they are quiet and stoic but that allows you to project a lot on to them. A lot of fantasy. It makes things really loaded, but you’re not sure if it is or if you created the meaning behind little actions. That song is about, in a creative way, a threesome where you’re both using the same person to make a combined projection. Use that portal as a way to connect with each other. Sometimes that felt inappropriate, because he’s not saying anything. [Laughs]

8. “Dion”

I was almost going to ask about this and “Capezio” together, because there are these handful of characters on the album — Alan as Angel, Jason again, Tate, Dion.

HADREAS: They’re all real people I was thinking of, and then I fictionalize the scene we’re in together. I make them represent more than… I mean, they’re just themselves. But to me they’re totems. I was trying to think of an arrangement of everyone that will show and not tell the thing I’m wanting to share.

It’s also a way to process. Some of the dynamics I’m talking about are ones where I don’t fully understand why I’m into it, or if I should be. A lot of it is based around the era after [writing music for and performing in the dance piece The Sun Still Burns Here]. The dance was a way for me to investigate real things but in a setting that is a performance and a fantasy with actual people.

When we spoke about Set My Heart, we were talking about that as well. Your involvement in the dance project seems to have lasted very long as a fundamental shift in how you are thinking about your music and writing.

HADREAS: I hadn’t found a way to take that energy outside of when I’m isolated in my room writing. I’m embodying the thing I’m writing, I guess as a portal for me to dig up actual feelings instead of feeling like… nothing, but knowing there’s a shitload under the surface. [Laughs] It’s a way for me to fictionalize things so the real thing can come up. With the dance there was no processing. It was instant. I’d be contorted, then I’d be crying. It makes it safer to explore. Nobody’s going to judge you for doing something disgusting because it’s “Oh, it’s art.”

9. “In A Row”

I love this notion in this song, of running into bad situations kind of for the story, or to have more experience to write about. This image of you being in the trunk of a car saying you’re going to get so many poems out of it is so funny.

HADREAS:[Laughs] I think in a lot of ways I’ve shaken it off, because I’ve done way less bad things than I did when I was younger. When you’re younger — especially if you want to be creative — you think you need it. In some ways, I guess I have written about all those things. It has been a source of inspiration. But I don’t think it’s needed. I don’t think it’s necessary. I probably would’ve just written about something else, and it might’ve been just as dark or disgusting or fucked up. I didn’t need to be in the fucked-up thing to go there.

Also, when you’re doing all that stuff, I never made anything. It’s 10 years later that I wrote about it. I guess you grow up thinking people do write whole records on cocaine. But I was certainly was in no position to do that. You can’t sit down and do it when you’re really high. I was doing more things to get me high. I wasn’t on my piano.

Maybe this is as good a place as any to ask this: You said some central conflict or theme of the record was a “back and forth between internal and external.”

HADREAS: Alan would make the plans to hang out with my ex-boyfriend. My best friend once called me out: “Alan is the one making the plans, what are you doing?” I’m realizing I rely on tour, I rely on Alan, I rely on a lot of stuff to drag me out of myself. I’ve built it into my life in a way that’s amazing, and I’m happy for it. But in COVID, or when I wasn’t touring, or when me and Alan became less enmeshed (in a healthy way), I realized I had to instigate if I wanted to have a fuller life.

I couldn’t rely on a schedule to do it for me. I realized it was days before I think about messaging someone, even though I feel very lonely too. Why am I not exercising? It’s been proven to me that’s very helpful for me. I was getting so frustrated with my unwillingness to move towards the things that would shake me out, and the unwillingness to do it myself. I couldn’t muster the energy, I guess, because the spiral was more familiar and weirdly less scary because it didn’t require change.

10. “Hanging Out”

The record is beautiful and carefully arranged, and it exists logically in the world of Perfume Genius. But, you know, it’s been five years since the last “proper” Perfume Genius album, and that last album had some of your biggest songs and some very ebullient material, like “On The Floor.” Half a decade on, returning with a very vulnerable and musically gentler record… did that worry you at all?

HADREAS: I don’t, really. I just do whatever is there. I go in to write, sometimes, with “Let’s do something crazy! Let’s go more beautiful!” But it ends up being what it is, and I let it be without making sense. Even song to song on records, I don’t really worry if they make sense together. They’re all coming from the same place, and that is the through line to me. I usually just pick whatever feels most inspired, and sometimes the most inspired stuff is the stuff that feels the riskiest, or the most difficult to articulate.

When the songs started coming out in this way, it felt the most right. They were coming out very wordy, so I thought the words had to be really good then. I was very obsessive about the lyrics, in a way I was in the beginning, but it was more effortless to get there back then. Later albums, I was getting really excited about the music communicating as much if not more than the lyrics. It’s not that this album doesn’t have elements of all those things, but I really wanted the lyrics to be as good.

“In A Row” partially thwarts my theory here, but I was thinking about what you said about “Left For Tomorrow” fading in and then fading out, and I was thinking about how the record grows more vaporous in its final acts. This feeling like the album begins with this loudness in “It’s A Mirror” and then it kinda drifts out with “Hanging Out” and “Glory.”

HADREAS: Some of those songs feel a bit more mystical, and the earlier songs are more rooted in the real world. Some of the other songs are more supernatural. “Hanging Out” is like, “What if I loved death?” It’s so relieving after trying to be really ethical and kind. That song’s just about eating my friend. [Laughs]

Wait, didn’t the album bio describe “Hanging Out” as “boyish camaraderie” or something!?

HADREAS:[Laughs] Well the genesis of it is my friend and me dancing in the woods. But my brain went somewhere gnarlier because I think I was craving a release from trying to… I don’t know, think about everything. I was like, “What if I loved shame and dying and it was weaponized.” There’s a swamp witch song on each record where I give up trying so hard to be good.

There’s always gotta be the Alan song and the swamp witch song.

HADREAS: I showed my friend the lyrics and I was like, “It’s kind of about eating you, is that OK?” and he was like “Yeah, I love it.”

11. “Glory”

In a recent Guardian interview, you were partially looking back on your career thus far, and Too Bright having turned 10, and some of the narratives that stuck in your career. And one of those things was queerness and gender identity being so constant, but also still something you were writing about. You talked about how there was sort of a playbook for how to be young and queer, but less so for domestic middle-age as you’re entering.

HADREAS: That song is just letting things be. A lot of your early life is trying to figure out what it is, and defending it. Once you stop worrying about it or trying to prove it, you start questioning. It becomes more uncategorizable, or something. It feels like a relief after trying to categorize it for so long. But then the categories exist, so then what do you do? [Laughs]

When I said that thing about “vaporous,” the album sort of eases out. Earlier you said that part of what was so scary about the album was it was coming from a vulnerable place, some of which wasn’t resolved. So what does this final title track represent? Is there a moment of release, or is it more like an ellipsis?

HADREAS: I was thinking about the soul existing before, then going into a body, then going somewhere else after that. I feel like I write a lot about like… “What if I was vapor?” [Laughs] But in a way that always felt very sci-fi. “Glory” is not sci-fi. More of an “always existed, always will.” That’s what’s confusing about everything. I am in a body right now. What’re you gonna do about it? How do you do that but also know there’s so many things you don’t know? So many horrible things that could happen at any moment and you’re just supposed to hang out? How do you hold all of that at the same time?

I think that’s why I love David Lynch. It’s everything. It’s real life, the dream, funny, disgusting, scary, hot. It feels like you’re supposed to pick one thing and you move on to the next thing, as if there’s supposed to be this linear movement to living when everything is a ball of chaos. Then you’re just supposed to pick “Now it’s food time” and “Now it’s paying bills time” but everything is so fucked up! And then you’re guilty about it being fucked up, or wonder if you really are or if you’re just taking yourself too seriously, and then you’re embarrassed because you’ve been doing that and everyone was like, “Hey, we were trying to hang out with you.”

Glory is out now via Matador.