In the corner of the room, as though embroidered into its Victorian walls, two young men lay idly draped across one another; limbs locked and lips cushioning a heedless surrender to the summer heat. An hour away before tonight’s headliner is set to perform, intimacy already takes a cloudless shape over his audience, filling the iron-railed and wooden bowels of Hoxton Hall with a drunken air of child-like excitement. Prepare a deep breath and say hello to ‘Perfume Genius’, whose lo-fi lullabies will instantly dress your neck with the strong scent of catharsis and your heart with a welcomed weight called love.

Sounding like the gay lovechild of Michael Stipe and (although it’s a frequented comparison) Sufjan Stevens, Seattle-born Mike Hadreas aka. Perfume Genius, has recently released his highly anticipated debut album ‘Learning’ here in the UK. Although the album may never have come about, if he hadn’t extradited the demons of his New York adolescence to Washington, where during the writing of the record, he returned to live with his Mother and purge himself of the damage, addiction, abuse and suicide which are this album’s blood and glue.

Coming in at just under a hard-hitting 30 minutes, ‘Learning’ is a much-belated diary entry ripped from his palms and burned onto the back of your eyelids. Moreover, hearing it live is a hundred times more heart achingly magical and intense than just letting your imagination swallow it whole alone in your bedroom. It may be an extremely personal record but it’s one that was never meant to stay private.

Yes, Hadreas hasn’t lived the easiest of pasts…but the glass shards of his decadently self-obliterative history are now being pieced together into a far kinder reflection of the happy life a 26yr old should lead…

Onstage Perfume Genius carries an otherworldly air of fragility with each second of his performance. You could mainly put this down to the nature of the stories he shares and the strain of conjuring the same painful memories every time he puts his fingers to the keys. However, you may also argue he gives the impression of not feeling quite as confident a musician as he should (even accompanied by a 2nd keyboardist, also on vocals.) This unsurprisingly only adds to his charm.
Each time Hadreas begins to sing, his tremulous voice lacquers the room with such beauty and heated gravity, it’s as though its pressured release comes from a claustrophobic maze of ornate metallic pipes. A warm quavering escape delivered word by word.



I stare at him imagining whether, if I peered deep down into his mouth long and far enough, I’d see the bones of his rib cage slowly dancing like a player piano…Or if someone were to climb into his chest, they’d enter a copper metropolis of shimmering skeleton; with sepia photos of his childhood tacked like ‘wanted’ posters to his heavy lungs with chewing gum.

Listening to him play ‘Mr Petersen’ whilst trying to paint the lyrics like movie scenes to the story’s questionably unsavory (“he let me smoke weed in his truck, if I could convince him I loved him enough”) but tragically beautiful relationship, “he made me a tape of Joy Division, he told me there was a part of him missing. When I was 16, he jumped off a building…” leaves you with an image that will haunt your curiosity with sadness forever.

‘Lookout, Lookout’ and ‘You Won’t Be Here’ mesmerize with the same tumbling piano-lead melancholia that draws an ill-fitted smile on your face, and tightens a reel of invisible ribbon across your now seemingly naked torso. Whereas ‘Gay Angels’ and ‘No Problem’ are the most devastatingly ambient of synth-laden hymns, delicately hemorrhaging in your ears. The former swathes and severs with lapping hums and distorted breaths, running like a river along the pit of your stomach before culminating in terrifyingly piercing whispers… “It’s okay, it’s okay…”


I picture myself climbing onstage and checking for a safety valve melded into his spine, or going ghost-busting inside his arteries - then luckily snap back into the room to remain in my position as a voyeur, stretching my neck over the balcony to check if the corner of the room’s lovers are still conscious, before sighing heavily and taking a long sip of my Jack Daniels.