The new album, Ugly Season, was written as an accompaniment to the immersive dance piece created by Perfume Genius and choreographer Kate Wallich, The Sun Still Burns Here. The work was commissioned by Seattle Theatre Group and Mass MoCA and was performed through residencies in Seattle, Minneapolis, New York and Boston throughout 2019. Three years later we get to listen to the album that Perfume Genius produced alongside Grammy award-winning producer and long-time collaborator Blake Mills, and created in collaboration with Alan Wyffels, Hadreas' long-time partner.

The record starts with Just a room, a taste of what it’s to come, Mike’s voice makes beautiful utterances alongside a profound orchestration, marking the beginning of this journey, a score of things to come. This is a trip full of emotions in which Perfume Genius invites us to travel through brief hymns. The songs, despite being designed for the dance part of this project, are exquisite and capture the emotion of his singular style. It’s important to highlight the instrumental side of the album; they are not interludes. Especially Scherzo that maintains tautness and spills into Ugly Season (the track) with slippery, greasy lyrics, leaving room for the ambivalence of sensuality, divinity, and grotesque. Eye in the Wall brings warmth to this album and its percussion is a brilliant exercise in meter to maintain the suspense of a track.

Pop Song and Photograph are probably the two songs closest to the Perfume Genius work we’re more familiar with. They still have this halo of innovation that is experimental even for him. The ravey Hellbent sounds like a ritual in itself, there’s a trance-like experience almost like a climax that gives way to the outro of the record; Cenote. It’s the perfect song to listen to as if it were meditation at the end of a gym class but you should listen to it with headphones and holding hands with someone you love.

And there is more. As the dance piece couldn’t be performed during the pandemic, Hadreas offered the now-completed recordings up to Jacolby Satterwhite, known for his immersive multidisciplinary technique that fuses live video and 3-D animation.

“My visual narrative serendipitously mirrors the lyrical direction in his music; it’s a rare, like-minded bond. It’s a creation myth. How do you architecturally mould and render an idealised version of utopia? It’s about making something that you desire so beyond your scope that it’s hard to grapple into a concrete form.” explains Satterwhite.

Pygmalion’s Ugly Season is the result, and it is a Pixar-esque dystopian gay graphic adventure where black and white vintage holograms dance and merge into the projection of both artists’ visual imaginary. There are beautiful moments in which the artist dancing alongside Tate Justas takes Tom Galle’s VR Hug famous photography to a new level. The piece goes beyond the typical datamoshing and glitching our eyes are already accustomed to. The music blends entrancingly with the whole video, and what really ties both sides of the project together is the dancing. The work of the team of people involved in this extra sensorial project elevates it to museum display status.

Beyond its complexity, Ugly Season is a record about connection, and it succeeds when you listen to it. This album is taking the risk of being free and encapsulates some of the best work Perfume Genius has ever done. That sets the bar quite high, but also shows in a new way his immense ability to make art that touches the soul, that caresses the heart.

Somehow, the music of Perfume Genius is so unique that it is difficult to find references to locate it. And there’s no need to. But we could probably say that it’s like the lovechild of George Michael and Björk, when it comes to his creative realm, advanced for its time, revolutionary in the sense of his queernes. For many of us this is vital, as we’ve found a mirror in which to visualise that there is a way to create beautiful things when you are different, it is possible to belonging in our culture.

This is one step further on his game, a transmedia experience with dance as its axis. “I also just use dance as self-care and nourishment”, as he puts it. It’s deep, but the timing makes it make sense; we’ve been living through an ugly season lately in many mundane ways, and this seems to be the soundtrack to dance to and welcome something that lies at the core of this album: now is the time of the season for loving. We spoke to the artist himself about this new chapter and more.