Perfume Genius looks past straight lines. His songs bend and lurch, shifting mid-thought like he’s writing three endings and refusing to pick one. On Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, those instincts get magnified by the band around him: Jim Keltner, Pino Palladino, Matt Chamberlain. The kind of lineup that usually ends up in a Rock Hall documentary, not backing a queer art-pop sorcerer. “A dream team is a dream team for a reason,” Mike Hadreas says, still half in disbelief. “It felt out of my reach.”
Producer Blake Mills had the Rolodex, so Hadreas just showed up with his demos—fully fleshed out sketches he was perfectly willing to let explode. “I’m not sacred about keeping anything from the demo, as long as the spirit is intact,” he says. Spirit, in his world, means following instincts even if they involve leaping off cliffs mid-song. The band caught him every time.
That willingness to fall came partly from The Sun Still Burns Here, his 2019 collaboration with choreographer Kate Wallich. It was dance, music, and performance all bleeding into each other. “I wanted the dancers to sing, I wanted my partner to dance,” he says. “I was holding people and being held, writing in a room with bodies.” It rewired him: the solitary writer suddenly connected to flesh, gravity, and the kind of transcendence you don’t find alone in a bedroom.
So the new record is physical, in sound and in imagery. The cover looks like masculinity reimagined as sculpture, all dirt and muscle but vulnerable at the edges. Hadreas laughs at the binary. “All of those things have always existed in equal measure for me. Presenting one doesn’t cancel the other. I just want to be covered in dirt.”
The songs embody that dirt—textured, messy, refusing to polish themselves into pop tidiness. “Describe” started as a slow, melancholy ballad until Mills ripped open a wall of guitar fuzz, leaving Hadreas to whisper soft vocals inside the storm. The desperation got louder, the guitar more punishing. “On the Floor” pivots into a 1950s shuffle, Motown sneaking in the back door. None of it feels forced. “They don’t feel like different people to me,” he says. “I’m happy to shift.”
It’s that shifting—between bodies, between genres, between masculinity and its undoing—that makes Set My Heart on Fire Immediately feel less like a record and more like a living organism. Perfume Genius doesn’t need to pick a lane. He’s too busy rolling around in the dirt.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
