Glory has a pristine surface and a tender, roiling underside. Mike Hadreas seventh album is muscular, filled out by his partner in life and songcraft Alan Wyffels and longtime producer Blake Mills alongside the fiercest band Perfume Genius has ever assembled: guitarists Meg Duffy and Greg Uhlmann, drummers Tim Carr and Jim Keltner, and bassist Pat Kelly. These players marshall their power, and Hadreas his macabre imaginings and gallows humor, to humane ends. Perfume Genius pries open a mildewed den full of alienation, longing and desire and lets it bask in the sunlight.

The records central conflict, says Hadreas, is the back and forth between internal and external. Promoting his string of beloved, increasingly ambitious albums during the past decade and a halftouring the world, dwelling in the public eyeclashed with his innate impulse toward isolation. For Glory, he discovered a new songwriting process because he welcomed the dynamics of a group, leaving room in his compositions for his friends to flesh out the arrangements. As Hadreas says: Im more engaged with the band and the audience. Im still on some wild tear, but theres more access and its more collaborative, in a way that makes it better, but also scarybecause it feels more vulnerable.

Lyrically, these 11 concise tracks reveal uncanny situations that we can just barely discern, scenes of domesticity and desperation projected through an idiosyncratic, queer prism. Each cut is a character sketch at its core, and Hadreas assembles a whole cast: Dion, Angel, Tate, the familiar Jason we recognize from his eponymous number on 2020s Set My Heart On Fire Immediately and Hadreas last release Ugly Season. These figures float through an abstracted landscape even as Perfume Genius pins them down with a novelists specificity. The result is mesmerizing and life-affirming, a bonafide singer-songwriter record thats both the most lyrically deft and musically eloquent statement of his career. – Daniel Felsenthal

Tracklisting

1. It’s a Mirror

2. No Front Teeth feat. Aldous Harding

3. Clean Heart

4. Me & Angel

5. Left For Tomorrow

6. Full On

7. Capezio

8. Dion

9. In a Row

10. Hanging Out

11. Glory