Heaven Scent

It’s noon in Seattle and Mike Hadreas, Perfume Genius’ soft-spoken protagonist, is having a duvet day. The 28 year-old has spent the morning under the covers with a mobile phone conducting interviews and reflecting on a life-changing two years that have thrust him into the full glare of indie acclaim. A recovering alcoholic who laid his demons bare in the fragile and delicate soundscapes of 2010’s Learning, Hadreas struggled to adjust to the unblinking attention the album brought him.

“The prospect of making a career out of music wasn’t in my head when I wrote the first album. I was so nervous, it was all so new. I’d never even played shows before and I certainly didn’t expect the reaction I got.”
So, as he prepares to release the follow up Put Your Back N 2 It, what has he learned about making music since then?
“I learned that in order for me to be happy and comfortable, I need to think a lot less of myself and think of others more often. I guess I’ve realised that I need to get to a place whereby if everything was gone and all my circumstances that are now so much better suddenly went away, that I would still be okay. For this album, I was completely freaked out by the weight of expectation on me: I told myself that I needed to make it really quickly, that it had to be the best album ever and that everyone had to like it. It got easier when I realised that the most important thing was to know who I was writing for, rather than thinking I needed to convince anyone to like it.”
While his debut was a highly self-oriented work that sought to make sense of the world and his place within it, Put Your Back N 2 It is more outward-looking, with songs that plow furrows of empathy for feelings he’s come to see as universal.
“I’m very used to thinking that my problems were just mine and that I was very alone in them. But after the album came out, people were writing to me and sharing their stories and I came to realise that no matter how fucked-up you are, you’re not alone in it. I decided that if I could be more comforting to other people on this album, then that was what I wanted to do.”
The need for comfort is something Hadreas understands. Sobriety, he admits, is a daily battle; one that he’s chosen to fight in one of the most hostile professional environments outside bartending.
“The music business is tough in that respect but I can’t just hide in my apartment all day. Alcohol is a lot of people’s way to get to know you... it’s a social tool. So I’ll meet someone and we’ll be talking and they’ll be like, ‘Um... do you want a Sprite or a glass of milk?’” he laughs. “These days, I just accept that I have to be really awkward and not know how to deal with things sometimes if I want to turn up to shows and answer the phone when I need to. It goes with the territory.”
Undoubtedly, such a path requires considerable strength, and the space between simultaneous durability and vulnerability is something that his delicate music embraces.
“There is a bravery in being gentle about things, in being vulnerable, and I think sometimes people get what’s tough or bad-ass backwards. I’m very defensive of that belief. You don’t need to be screaming your point all the time! I’ve grown up thinking that if I’m going to be a man, I’m going to be tough, and that’s definitely not going to be achieved by being sensitive and singing about my emotions, but it’s kinda backwards, and it took me a while to figure that out.”
Redefining strength to himself and reframing traditional images of masculinity constitute a big part of a personal journey that he explores through the music he makes. Indeed, the promo video for ‘Hood’ features Hadreas and a hulking gay porn star twice his size in their underwear engaged in a series of tender, if provocative, scenes.
“I come from a wrestling family of Greeks. My brother was a wrestler, and I wrestled too in high-school. When we weren’t in school, we were wrestling. It was a big part of family life. But then when I was 16, I came out, and I thought maybe I couldn’t do both. Being a wrestler and probably the only openly gay person in my school... um, yeah. Will I ever want to do it again? (laughs) No. I’m over it now, but I wish that I’d just fucking wrestled anyway.”

Put Your Back N 2 It is out now.