Glory

Hadreas toys with classic rock and Americana sounds masterfully, these canonical totems of genre upended by his tenderness and specificity of imagery. This is his most band-driven album, and all the players here are vibrating on their own collective frequency.

It’s the shortest Perfume Genius album since Too Bright, but it’s so texturally dense and stylistically ambitious that it should immediately be considered his greatest invention—as it seamlessly updates familiar Perfume Genius concepts with unflinching curiosity, raises the bar of his own excellence and finds beautiful, generous order and renewal in the mess Set My Heart on Fire Immediately left behind.

With Glory, Hadreas discovers a rare balance between approachable songwriting and musical ambition that reinvigorates his music.

‘Glory’ stands as testimony to the ongoing creative confidence of Perfume Genius, and the towering intentionality that streams through his work. With nothing left to prove, he’s redoubled his efforts, and added another Everest to his catalogue.

Mike’s decision to collaborate more heavily births perhaps his most musically expansive record to date, in itself an exercise in allowing the external in.

Glory welcomes everything whether ecstatic or low-spirited, knowing that time, the inescapable spectre, will take it away and leave behind a masterpiece of memory such as this record itself.

A record as sonically rich as it is lyrically bold. [Apr 2025, p.35]

The moments of splendor promised by the album’s title aren’t blinding bursts of passion but quiet triumphs of the spirit.

It’s hard to say it’s his best album yet, because Perfume Genius has not made a bad album, really. But as Hadreas initially previewed, it is his most personal, and it’s crafted purely with mastery.

Glory spotlights Hadreas as he mines this incarnation, its abundant beauty and messiness. He’s left a window to that alt-life open, however, and the winds from that realm gust through these songs.

Yet for all the sombre maturity often shrouding this record, it’s full of energy and biting nuance. The vigour of Hadreas’s lyrics once again confirms Perfume Genius as a consummate chronicler of 21st-century sensuality.

With its fresh simplicity, Glory is a blazing return to form for Perfume Genius, who, on his seventh album, has come full circle as a pop star that has never been afraid to emerge as something brand new, familiar, or even as No Shape at all.

Glory is rich with beauty, but the band—Hadreas; longtime partner Alan Wyfells; producer Blake Mills; and drummers Tim Carr and Jim Keltner, bassist Pat Kelly, and guitarists Meg Duffy and Greg Uhlmann—twists it just enough to let in flashes of the strange and idiosyncratic.

A fluid, fully felt album of artfully crafted confessionals and catharsis. [Apr 2025, p.103]

Over its 11 tracks, it draws the listener fully into its dreamworld. [May 2025, p.86]