Perfume Genius: “It’s a Mirror”
From the vulnerable piano confessionals of Learning through the cinematic grandeur of Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, each Perfume Genius era has embodied different facets of queer experience and expression. “It’s a Mirror,” the lead single from the forthcoming album Glory, represents another evolution in Mike Hadreas’ ever-shifting artistic persona, showcasing him as a more assured pop crooner. The new single continues the tradition of transformation while returning to familiar thematic territory: domestic anxiety, masculine presence as a threat (“I still run and hide when a man’s at the door”), and the tension between establishment and authenticity. These concerns, long central to Hadreas’ work, take on new resonance following the experimental abstractions of 2022’s Ugly Season as if emerging from that album’s avant-garde chrysalis with renewed, urgent directness. One thing is clear this time: Hadreas has never been more unapologetically ready to be a showman.
Over a Southern Gothic-tinged folk track that mixes acoustic guitar, piano, harmonium, and an explosive drum progression, the lyrics weave together the personal and mythical in classic Perfume Genius fashion—cigarette light combing floors lead to biblical swarms of locusts, domestic spaces expand into stretching horizons. Though a long specialty of Hadreas, this mix between intimate detail and grand metaphor serves a more pointed investigation of memory and progress here. When he asks “Can I get off without reliving history/And let every echo just sing to itself?” he’s not just questioning personal healing but engaging with broader questions of queer history and inheritance. The tension between forward motion and historical weight has rarely been so explicitly addressed in his work, even as the lyrics maintain the poetic abstraction he’s cultivated since Too Bright. If anything, “It’s a Mirror” hints at a more accessible body of work from an artist known for thriving in murkiness.
The debut studio album by the UK-based singer is a candid assemblage of self-confidence and insecurity, both at once.