Description
SORTIE OFFICIELLE LE 15 MAI 2020
AN IMPRESSION OF PERFUME GENIUS’ SET MY HEART ON FIRE IMMEDIATELY
By Ocean Vuong
Can disruption be beautiful? Can it, through new ways of embodying joy and power, become a
way of thinking and living in a world burning at the edges? Hearing Perfume Genius, one
realizes that the answer is not only yes—but that it arrived years ago, when Mike Hadreas, at
age 26, decided to take his life and art in to his own hands, his own mouth. In doing so, he
recast what we understand as music into a weather of feeling and thinking, one where the body
(queer, healing, troubled, wounded, possible and gorgeous) sings itself into its future. When
listening to Perfume Genius, a powerful joy courses through me because I know the context of
its arrival—the costs are right there in the lyrics, in the velvet and smoky bass and synth that
verge on synesthesia, the scores at times a violet and tender heat in the ear. That the songs are
made resonant through the body’s triumph is a truth this album makes palpable. As a queer
artist, this truth nourishes me, inspires me anew. This is music to both fight and make love to.
To be shattered and whole with. If sound is, after all, a negotiation/disruption of time, then in the
soft storm of Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, the future is here. Because it was always here.
Welcome home.
