Perfume Genius

Seattle and the early albums

Michael Alden Hadreas was born on September 25, 1981 in Des Moines, Iowa, of Greek descent, and moved to the Seattle suburbs at about six or seven. He began recording in Seattle in 2005, took his stage name from the perfume-maker in Tom Tykwer's 2006 film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and by 2008 had a MySpace page; he later moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His instruments are voice and piano. Learning came out on Matador and Turnstile on June 22, 2010 (Pitchfork 8.2), followed by Put Your Back N 2 It (February 21, 2012). The pianist and collaborator Alan Wyffels joined for the Learning tour and played on Too Bright.

Too Bright was released on September 23, 2014 on Matador, produced by Adrian Utley of Portishead and Ali Chant, and runs 33:38 over eleven tracks. The singles were "Queen" (July 17, 2014) and "Grid" (September 9, 2014). Utley played synthesizer, bass and guitar and engineered and mixed it; John Parish, Jim Barr, Herve Becart and Ross Hughes also played, and Greg Calbi mastered it. A Line of Best Fit writer says it was tracked between two studios near Bristol. Hadreas said: I just wanted to push the darkness as far as I could, and, to Stereogum, that it carried an underlying rage that has slowly been growing since age 10 and has just begun to bubble up.

Reception and later records

Too Bright reached 83 on the Billboard 200 and 77 in the UK, and Metacritic scored it 87; Pitchfork's Brandon Stosuy gave it 8.5 as Best New Music, writing that a huge part of what makes the work so strong is the generous human spirit that bleeds into it, and Stereogum's Daniel Bromfield wrote in its tenth-anniversary review that what's remarkable today is how small and strange this album is. The Luke Gilford cover shows Hadreas as a man dressed as a woman dressed as a man. No Shape (May 5, 2017, produced by Blake Mills in Los Angeles) was nominated for a Grammy for best engineered album, Set My Heart on Fire Immediately followed on May 15, 2020, Ugly Season on June 17, 2022, and Glory, produced by Mills and written with Wyffels, on March 28, 2025. He curated part of Le Guess Who? in Utrecht in 2017 and made a cover of "Can't Help Falling in Love" for a Prada campaign in 2016. Setlist.fm lists 493 setlists and a Duo Tour in 2026.