It’s a stan page, essentially, for funny little apes doing funny little things. In one of the clips a little monkey scuttles around a kitchen in a bright red jumpsuit, with a ladle in one hand and a saucepan in the other. In the second, a monkey furiously cleans a car stereo with a wet rag. I had to ask – what about those two videos resonated with him so strongly?

"My insides match my outsides when I see it," he explains to me, sipping a from a can of Coke. "It’s surreal but sweet, and there’s a comfort in that. There’s chaos to it too. It includes everything. There’s another video of an orangutan sawing a log and I sometimes cry when I’m watching it. I can’t unpack why, fully… someone else would be better at doing that."

Long before it was normal to be inundated by some of the most bizarre material you’ve ever seen while replying to your auntie’s birthday post, Mike Hadreas of Perfume Genius was already trawling the internet for the esoteric and the slightly disturbed. "I watch everything," he confesses. He raves about 2005 British horror The Decent, a story, he tells me, about "a bunch of lesbians who go spelunking in a cave. Well… to me they’re lesbians." He loves Possession, and 2021 body-horror Titane, in which a woman has sex with a car and then begins to transform into one. "I watch a lot of French horror movies which are really extreme," he says. "I love fight-or-flight, final-girl survival films. When Alan [Wyffels, Hadreas’ bandmate and partner of sixteen years] is out, I trawl the internet for lists of the most disturbing movies of all time and make sure I’ve seen all of them." He pauses. "Sometimes you wish you hadn’t."

As Perfume Genius, Hadreas’ music doesn’t exactly scream extreme. Much of his music is, in fact, supremely sensitive. The project’s first two albums – 2010’s Learning and 2012’s Put UR Back N 2 It – are gossamer thin; the former recorded, literally, in Hadreas’ childhood home. From the beginning it was his voice that served as the source of the music’s enchanting quality; a delicate, throat-caught lilt which sounds like he’s on the verge of tears. Those early songs were mostly played on piano, written with bright, simple chords. Listening to them – especially when his audience was minuscule – felt like stumbling upon a cassette tape of lost lullabies. Perfume Genius songs are often beautiful, but beautiful in the way of a Romantic painting: so fragile that they feel perpetually on the brink of utter devastation.

Even at their prettiest, though, they had a dark underbelly and laid a naïve prism across themes of perversion, trauma, and loss. "Dark Parts" from Put UR Back N 2 It holds the shape of an adoring ballad, but it’s actually a song about the abuse his mother suffered at the hands of her grandfather. "Floating Spit" is about the drug addiction Hadreas succumbed to in his twenties. On Learning’s infamous "Mr. Peterson" he sings an ode to a semi-fictionalised teacher who groomed him then jumped off the roof of the school. "Mr. Peterson / I know you were ready to go," Hadreas sings, "I hope there’s room for you up above / Or down below."

Those early songs have a childlike quality: the waltz of the piano, the high pitch of Hadreas’ voice; they’re wide eyed and gauzy, but – like Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet calling for his mommy – they often detail horrific things. This pairing – of beauty and torment, of affection and perversion – was something which Hadreas felt attuned to early.

"Since I was very little I felt like something was very wrong, only you can’t see it," he tells me. The passing of David Lynch – one of the artists who best articulated a feeling of creeping unease beneath the facade of suburbia – hit Hadreas hard. "When I watched Twin Peaks when I was ten it was like having all of that mirrored for me. It was really sexy and funny too. It was everything. He’s a huge influence on me. Hearing Angelo Badalamenti’s score was the first time I felt parts of my brain which I couldn’t articulate. Things I was attracted to but afraid of." Noticeably, Lynch liked monkeys too.

Hadreas’ early sense of apprehension was only validated by his experiences as an adolescent. As the only flamboyant, gay kid at his Seattle high-school he was regularly beaten up and spat on by football players. He dropped out of school early and eventually moved to New York for a boy. At 21 he was jumped while walking down the street and ended up hospitalised. He began to drink socially and then anti-socially, until he replaced alcohol with cocaine and meth. In 2005 Hadreas returned to his mother's house in Seattle to try and sober up, and began writing songs. It was at an AA meeting that he first met Alan Wyfells, to whom Hadreas sang his first songs.

Since those early record – then just collaborations between the two of them – the sound of Perfume Genius has expanded dramatically. Over time Hadreas set about channeling his music through a cast of audacious personas: the bohemian Queen, the silk-wearing Dandy, the biker rebel. He is now a mainstay in the alternative scene, collaborating with the likes of Jack Antonoff and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and about to embark on an international tour. When he began to work on his new album though, the music he made in his parents’ home in Seattle began to loom large again.

"I really love those first two records," he declares. "I intentionally began thinking about how I wrote them because I really like the lyrics. There’s a zoomed-out grace and the humility was built in because I didn’t think anyone was going to hear them," he laughs. "For this album I was thinking of how to get back there. I had just gotten sober. I felt like I was on the other side of something and you can hear that I really wanted to be on the other side."

On the other hand, it is possible to see how Glory sees Hadreas returning to a mode he last occupied almost 13 years ago. Now 43 and living in LA with Wyfells, the new album sees Perfume Genius dropping the era-defining personas and looking around at middle age to find everything changed, and yet extraordinarily the same: a well-established musician stuck with the same anxieties he had as a teenager; the same spiralling thoughts. "I did another interview where they read a quote of mine from ten years ago and I was saying exactly the same stuff I am for this record… that was horrifying," Hadreas smiles, "but that’s how it is."

Where Learning and Put UR Back N 2 It explored a variety of traumas from his recent past, Glory applies the same emotional nakedness to the present. "For the last few albums, I’ve tried to embody something grander using archetypes," he explains. "This one feels more like just me. It’s untidy because there’s a lot of questions which are in process and not figured out. A lot of the songs are plainspoken, which feels far more vulnerable than filtering that through some character."

Like a great deal of Hadreas’ writing, the emotional truths he unearths through this process of digging are commonly held feelings and yet, perversely, the music of Perfume Genius is one of the few places you can find them in song. One of the most recurrent anxieties depicted in his music is a nervousness about interacting with the outside world. Ever since his teenage years Hadreas has dealt with a crippling introversion. "I’ve classically avoided everything at all costs," he told Loud And Quiet in 2012. "If it was gonna make me even a little bit uncomfortable, I would leave. I used to be nervous about making an appointment at the dentist… so I would have my friends call and pretend to be me."

It was feelings like these which first drew me to Hadreas’ music. As a teenager, I remember feeling that same kind of discomfort with the world. I was a naturally extroverted kid, but not necessarily a cool one; a music fan, a book nerd, and so I became a target in school. People would use my name as a slur and shut me out of rooms. I understand it now, but I certainly didn’t then. It’s the kind of thing that makes you vanish inside yourself. At university, people were far kinder (or simply older) and I was quickly surrounded by friends, but feelings like those don’t simply vanish. Once bitten, twice shy. When I first heard songs such as "Don’t Let Them In", the tender ballad from 2014’s Too Bright, it was like having those feelings reflected straight back at me.

The new album’s first single, "It’s A Mirror", isn’t simply about feelings of interactional anxiety but specifically about growing older with them; realising that they might not necessarily be going anywhere just because life looks entirely different now in middle age. "What do I get out of being established?" he sings in the song’s second verse. "I still run and hide when a man’s at the door." Glory’s remarkable cover art, shot by Cody Critcheloe, shows Hadreas strewn around his home in various states of distress while a seemingly innocuous family stands outside, calmly waiting.

When I first heard those lyrics, sat in a London bookshop, staring into a coffee cup like it was the bottom of a well, it immediately took me back to my own first interaction with Hadreas, eleven years earlier. After falling in love with Too Bright I travelled to Birmingham to Perfume Genius perform at the Oobleck – a tiny performance space hidden behind a dummy bookshop in a bar. I have a near-chronic compulsion to be early for all things and so my ex and I were there a good ninety minutes before the show, having a drink, when I spotted Hadreas eating with his team across the bar. I decided to go over and ask for a picture. It was my first time approaching anybody I even slightly cared about speaking to in the flesh but, when I said ‘hi,’ he seemed even more nervous than me. It was not how I expected those things to go.

I ask him whether those situations would go differently today. "I think so!" he says, after a moment’s thought. "A lot of it is just practise. I’ve done a bunch of shows, and I was terrified at the beginning. I still get nervous but now I have proof that I can do it. The idea of doing any public speaking or even private speaking where I have to be really confident…" he smiles, "I just can’t. It’s not like when I feel anxious, I even know why. It’s a buzz in my body and there’s no rhyme or reason to it. That’s what’s weird. Sometimes I’ll be terrified all over again of something I’ve done a hundred times. But with music I have a lot more chance."

After a highly productive period in 2019 and 2020 – when the band recorded both the critically acclaimed Set Your Heart On Fire Immediately and its follow up, the dub-y, disco-adjacent Ugly Season at the exact same time – Hadreas didn’t record new music for three full years, the longest lull of his career. He finds the pressure of being a working musician to be entirely counter-productive to the actual process of writing music. "You have to get to an exploratory space where you’re willing to make mistakes and try things which are really stupid. That’s hard to do when you have pressure to just make an incredible album again," he laughs.

Does he ever panic that it might just not happen this time? "Yes!" he tells me. "Every time! Even though this is my seventh record and I’ve proven to myself that I figure it out, it’s not built in. I can intellectually understand it but still feel panicked and confused. Plus I’ve just said so much stuff! I have so much music, what else could I possibly have to say…" It turns out, quite a lot. "I ended up writing most of the songs I wrote in a single week when Alan was gone," he explains. "I was singing really good at that time. I write in gibberish and fill out the lyrics later but with this one all of the songs were really wordy, even though I was singing in nonsense. I was like, ‘I clearly have a lot to say, I just don’t know what it is…’"

Once the words did come to him, Hadreas began writing with the expressed intention to escape the kind of cyclical thinking he depicts in the album’s first song. It’s an approach to songwriting inspired, in part, by the cult British folk-singer Billy Fay, a failed musician from the 20th century who experienced a late-life revival. He died just a few weeks before Hadreas and I spoke.

"I was fully in tears when I heard that he passed," he says, "because so many of his songs were about reckoning with the end. He was really earnest and graceful about it. It felt like he was saying a prayer to himself, aspiration-ally. I think the songs on this record are also me reckoning with the fact that I will die, which feels very true to me now rather than an abstract idea. I once tried to avoid thinking about those things because I thought I wasn’t going to be able to cope and for a few years I didn’t cope well at all. It came out as weird things, like being terrified of planes. On this album, though, I tried to do the same thing as Billy: being aspiration-ally sweet about things I don’t necessarily feel sweet towards, but want to."

Indeed, some of the people Hadreas expresses affection toward on Glory are the kind of people who, in his adolescence, did him a great deal of harm: manly men. "There are things about specific types of masculinity which I wonder why I’m attracted to," he says. "Even though I’m defiant against certain parts of it, I still want it, just not in a collaborative sense. I want to witness it, comfort it, and be around it."

"I feel like there’s a few songs like that on this record because I get sick of trying to fix something so I just think about ‘what if I just was it, what if I went fully into the ickiness and I loved it?’" he continues. "It’s kind of like a lawless place. It’s physical for me, when I’m craving that. It’s probably why I did drugs and drank: sometimes I just want to be bad. Those songs come from a place which is dark to the point where I begin to wonder, ‘Oh no, is this, like, inappropriate?’" he laughs.

He’s talking about tracks such as "Hanging Out", a creeping, cavernous cut the kind of which can only really be heard on Perfume Genius albums. "I’m four on the floor in the dirt," he sings softly. "I’m chewing his face like a hog." "It’s a really satisfying place to go," he confesses. "It feels cathartic because it allows for multiple things to be happening at once without me having to explain any of them. Some of the unease I felt when I was young felt almost supernatural, but as I got older I tried to understand that it was just shame which I was manifesting as, like, a demon," he laughs. "But I went to a psychic once and said this but explained to her, ‘I don’t think that there is actually an evil presence’ and she just went: ‘No, actually, I see it.’ That’s what these songs are: what if there was a demon, and I loved it?"

Those supposed contradictions between the innocent and the dangerous, between an unabashed shyness and total depravity, are what makes Perfume Genius songs intriguing, and perhaps elucidates Hadreas’ attraction towards the mania of horror films and monkey reels too. "They’re tapped into the chaos," he explains. "That’s what it is – chaos – because I think it’s all kind of the same. All the beauty, all the seediness, all the disgusting stuff – they’re all coming from the same ball of shit, it's just a different thread that you’re pulling from it."

Despite Glory’s interest in repeating cycles, thinking of his first albums has made it apparent that, in some crucial ways, Hadreas has changed over the years. "I can handle feedback now," he says "I’m more willing to edit and revise things. In the beginning it was one and done. I was so amazed that I did it that I didn’t want to touch it. ‘It must be amazing because I actually made a song.’ With Glory I wanted to harness the innocence of that but not feel like the baby place is going to be cancelled out by being more adult and editing. It took a long time to do because I really don’t like feedback or criticism at all."

I ask him what about criticism he reacts to so badly. He doesn’t strike me as a my-way-or-the-highway kind of a guy. "Not at all!" he says. "It’s because a lot of what the songs are about are all the things I’ve been terrorised for. People like when I do those things so I have to go somewhere tender to find those ideas and that means the songs really feel like they’re me. I’ve gotten better, but I used to play Alan a song and if he said, ‘I’m not really hearing it’ I’d go: ‘Oh, so you hate me?’" he laughs.

In 2020 Hadreas was approached by Seattle choreographer Kate Wallich who asked Perfume Genius to score a piece of hers titled The Sun Still Burns Here. Hadreas suggested that he perform in the show too and, after a lifelong battle with Crohn’s disease, found that dancing afforded him a degree of control over his body which he’d never before experienced. This is something which stayed with him.

"Sometimes me and Kate will rent a studio just to dance and talk and create. It feels really personal and therapeutic. It’s kind of like what I said about ‘Hanging On’: with dance you can commit completely – embody them and play with them. It’s not sexual, it’s not a conversation, but it is all that stuff mixed together. Sometimes, in the studio, it’s like ‘we kind of went to a fucked up place there.’ We’re not acknowledging it, but you can’t hide from it!" he laughs. "That’s what I do with songs too, create a portal for stuff to get out."

Among the swirling masses of anxiety and liberation that have become the beating heart of Perfume Genius’ music, there has often been one lynchpin which the other songs have centred around: Hadreas’ relationship with Alan. They have now been together for sixteen years. A track named in his honour appeared at the end of 2017's No Shape and now, on Glory, Hadreas has written another.

"Me & Angel" is a gorgeous piece of music, a stark, naked ballad sung with complete and total tenderness. It’s not simply a love song but a relationship song in totality; a gesture of pure devotion that takes in complicated feelings of regret and complacency too. "There’s a halo that’ll always hold its shape / That’s the core I’m leaning on," Hadreas sings. "Who am I to keep a smile from your face / if he’s an angel / he’s an angel." It’s one of the very few songs I’ve ever heard that articulates the particular devastation of having taken for granted the only living soul which understands you completely.

"That song is very sweet and generous and loving," Hadreas explains, "and I am like that, but not all the time. I’m more guarded. That song does not feel guarded at all. Sometimes I make those songs and show them to Alan, like: ‘See! This is what I’m really feeling even when I can’t articulate it.’ But when you do get to that graceful thing, everything else begins to feel like bullshit, all the noise in your head. The songs are a way to show up, purely, and, when you do that… it’s really sweet."