In 2010, one of my closest friends handed me a CD that he burned for me back when burning CDs was still a thing. "This guy's music is devastating. I think you'll dig it,” he said. It was Perfume Genius's first album Learning that he recorded in his mom's house in Everett, Washington. I tossed it in the front seat of my '00 Mazda and forgot about it until a few weeks later. I'd had a particularly bad fight with my then-boyfriend and purchased a pack of cigarettes with the intention of "going for a drive." I was 22, freshly graduated from university, and had nothing but time for dramatic gestures.
I put the CD in and drove off at twilight, meandering down the 202 just as the sky turned purple and the sun disappeared behind the trees of southern Pennsylvania. Even before I knew about the abuse and harassment Hadreas endured or about his struggle with addiction, I heard his words with a certainty that this guy had seen some shit. "No one will hear all your crying till you take your last breath." Though his first album is the most musically unsophisticated, the visceral rawness of Hadreas' lyrics hit you over the head. It’s composed of tiny fragmented details like a night you only remember in exquisitely flawed pieces; cassette tapes of Joy Division from a teacher, a pressed flower in a letter, a friend without a family. The album served as a shield for me. Listening to him self reflexively lay all of his trauma bare seemed - maybe the way it could only to a mentally ill early twenty-something - like an act of heroism.
No Shape is full of righteous intensity. As Jia Tolentino put it, "a slightly lurid type of happiness." It’s a contagious battle cry, a love letter, a melodious self actualization that both sparkles and creates a lump in my throat.
Though the material has changed, his resolve hasn’t. It’s hot to the touch, all brimming with possibility and warmth and quiet uncertainty. The same sad and gentle optimism that takes you in on Learning is now naked and unafraid on No Shape. It’s reassurance. The muffled, "It's okay" repeated at the end of Gay Angels, the acceptance of unabashed fragility, a hand pressing quickly on your shoulder.
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