Perfume Genius drops not only "Describe" as well as new album dates
Perfume Genius is set to perform with Tame Impala, he will be in Detroit at Little Ceasar Arena on May 31st
On May 15 Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas) will release his 5th studio album, Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, via Matador Records. Today, he shares the first single, “Describe,” a track that captures a sense of living in the moment through a heavy fog of grisly distortion and tumbling slide guitars. Hadreas notes, “it started as a really somber ballad. It was very minimal and very slow. And then it turned into this beast of a song. I started writing about when you are in such a dark place that you don't even remember what goodness is or what anything feels like. And so, the idea was having someone describe that to you, because you forgot or can’t get to it.” Its accompanying video, self-directed by Hadreas, envisions “an end of the world where there are no boundaries, there are no edges, no rules, or the rules are completely new with how you interact with each other and the space around you."
The music video for “Describe” was directed by Hadreas and features Seattle-based choreographer Kate Wallich’s dance company The YC. Wallich and Hadreas worked together on 2019’s The Sun Still Burns Here, a collaborative dance performance in which Hadreas wrote the music and performed.
Perfume Genius will join Tame Impala on a North American arena tour throughout the Spring and Summer. The dates kick off May 29 at The United Center in Chicago and conclude in Gorge, WA on August 7 at The Gorge Amphitheatre. All dates are listed below.
Set My Heart On Fire Immediately sees Hadreas re-teaming with GRAMMY-nominated producer Blake Mills and features contributions from musicians Jim Keltner, Pino Palladino, Matt Chamberlin and Rob Moose. It was recorded in Los Angeles, where Perfume Genius settled in 2017 with longtime partner and musical collaborator Alan Wyffels. Pre-order Set My Heart On Fire Immediately
The album explores and subverts concepts of masculinity and traditional roles, and introduces decidedly American musical influences. Throughout the album Hadreas plays with themes of love, sex, memory and the body, channeling popular music mythologies while irreverently authoring its own. "I wanted to feel more open, more free and spiritually wild," says Hadreas, "and I'm in a place now where those feelings are very close-- but it can border on being unhinged. I wrote these songs as a way to be more patient, more considered -- to pull at all these chaotic threads hovering around me and weave them in to something warm, thoughtful and comforting"
The sense of communion and physicality was borne in part from Hadreas’ work on The Sun Still Burns Here. Already a formidable stage presence, it had elevated him to a rigorous multi-disciplinary performer. “I had been working with them for a year and a half. With lots of rehearsals, lots of performances, lots of relationships and energies, and I was feeling connected to my body. I was feeling connected to all their bodies. And having boundaries be blurred and having rules be gone and having all this play within nonsense and absurdity -- in tandem with a real connection and truly valuable work.” In 2019, the show traveled to Boston, New York and Minneapolis after its Seattle debut.
Set My Heart On Fire Immediately will be available on May 15th at all retailers. Fans can pre-order the limited edition double LP in translucent blue with a 24”x36” poster via the Matador web store or in regular black at this link. The Matador web store limited edition record can also be bundled with an exclusive t-shirt.
“Can disruption be beautiful? Can it, through new ways of embodying joy and power, become a way of thinking and living in a world burning at the edges? Hearing Perfume Genius, one realizes that the answer is not only yes—but that it arrived years ago, when Mike Hadreas, at age 26, decided to take his life and art in to his own hands, his own mouth. In doing so, he recast what we understand as music into a weather of feeling and thinking, one where the body (queer, healing, troubled, wounded, possible and gorgeous) sings itself into its future. When listening to Perfume Genius, a powerful joy courses through me because I know the context of its arrival—the costs are right there in the lyrics, in the velvet and smoky bass and synth that verge on synesthesia, the scores at times a violet and tender heat in the ear. That the songs are made resonant through the body’s triumph is a truth this album makes palpable. As a queer artist, this truth nourishes me, inspires me anew. This is music to both fight and make love to. To be shattered and whole with. If sound is, after all, a negotiation/disruption of time, then in the soft storm of Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, the future is here. Because it was always here. Welcome home.
”
