Glory is Perfume Genius' country-inflected cinematic masterpiece

It has no shape, and is neither present nor absent. It constructs, then at one point destructs. Rules on earth bend towards it, always on a mission to violate, appease, defy, deceive it – yet to no avail. Glory, his multifaceted seventh album, is unashamed to be another instance of all of these hopeless endeavours. “Left for Tomorrow”, soaked in slithering, breathless synthlines, imagines the dreadful passing of a motherly figure. “In a Row”, a restive cousin of “Whole Life”, submits to every impulse that revivifies the expiring life. Across the tracklist, there’s a violent hunger for caprice, a quiet desire for euphoria, a fervid anxiety for impending deaths. What haunts and triggers these cancerous feelings is no one else but time.

Hadreas welcomed its currents right around 2020’s Set My Heart on Fire Immediately. Aging, as he realised on the enchanting opener “Whole Life”, comes with a blessing: life’s second half might be much brighter. But that sentiment has transitioned into a roiling trepidation of what time will take after it gives. Why Glory showers itself in country music (a past hit genre that’s now receiving a resurgence) and why his wondrous queering of it never refuses to embrace jolting surprises, can be explained under this notion. “It’s a Mirror” lures you into thinking the song has ended when it halts mid-section, then surges into a more intense replay of what came before as if to say the future could just be a glorified mirror of the past.

If filmmaking is on his to-do list, now is a step closer to its realisation. Haunted by time, Glory is Hadreas’ best executed cinema, one that screens midlife disillusionment via incredibly flawed characters and a Western-on-crack soundtrack. Jason once again reappears like a director’s kindred actor alongside an obscure cast on the tremulous “Capezio”. Legendary producer Blake Mills and Hadreas’ greatest assembled band mold a slowburn soundscape that meaningfully recontextualizes his previous musical ventures. To have Put Your Back N 2 It–esque ballads receive a fiercer texture as on “Me & Angel” and “Dion” isn’t merely an artistic transformation, but also a display of lifelong tribulations.

Glory’s lyricism is deliciously metrical, tactically puzzling, and another illuminating outturn of profound observations. Every line on “It’s a Mirror” is sharp and precise, never missing a beat and always delivering a punch: “Can I get off without reliving history / And let every echo just sing to itself?” “No Front Teeth” exudes an undefeated powerhouse with dear friend Aldous Harding that makes for an instant career classic. “Capezio” pictures a fantasy scene of sexual liberation in nasty, delirious yet seductive setting phrases. “Pooling his spit in a jar”, he warbles. “Picking her hair from my mouth.” Even though you don’t know what’s going on, his words hold such immersive power that the pending question becomes pointless.

On the chilling tour de force “Hanging Out”, Hadreas wallows in Pat Kelly’s seething bass, with Tim Carr and Jim Keltner’s hushed kicks from the husky background. It’s an act not of surrender but of wilful reconciliation. There’s no man to chase after like on the pulsating “Full On” – only endless meandering in the yard, killing time. Mills’s glorious ascent at the end, led by the synergy between seraphic arpeggio and the welder’s flashes, sums up his contemplation of queer adulthood: better to live in the melange of all things than to brood over idyllic impossibilities. Glory welcomes everything whether ecstatic or low-spirited, knowing that time, the inescapable spectre, will take it away and leave behind a masterpiece of memory such as this record itself.