Three years on from ‘Ugly Season’* — an album so deliberately closed-off it felt like a door locked from the inside — Perfume Genius returns with “It’s A Mirror“, and the contrast is flat-out disorienting. Where that record buried its vocals in industrial fog and dared you to find them, this one opens on an acoustic guitar riff so clean and direct it sounds like a different artist. Not a reinvention. A correction. The kind of move that quietly reframes everything.
That opening guitar figure is the first thing that earns its keep. Lean, interlocking, almost country — it carries a flavour closer to Gram Parsons than anything Perfume Genius has touched before, and the discipline holds without flinching. Producer Blake Mills keeps the arrangement ruthlessly honest: nothing is over-cluttered, which means every word Mike Hadreas delivers lands with the weight it deserves. “Can I get off without reliving history / And let every echo just sing to itself?” is a couplet that would read as self-indulgent on paper, but in context it arrives like a quiet emergency. The chorus builds toward something close to euphoria — backing vocals sweeping in like pressure changing — without ever letting go of the song’s intimacy. By the time it’s a mirror down loops back for the final time, the track has done something uncommon: made the act of staying stuck feel like an event.
The video, directed by Cody Critcheloe (aka SSION, long-term Hadreas collaborator), shoots with the internal logic of a dream that keeps revising itself. Hadreas moves through multiple emotional states — tenderness, panic, confrontation, something that briefly resembles grief — without any of them resolving cleanly into the next. The interiors are warm and slightly wrong, the kind of domestic spaces where the wallpaper is doing half the storytelling — territory that’ll feel familiar if you caught our words on The Smile‘s “Don’t Get Me Started“, which deals in a similar brand of visual unease.
Critcheloe and Hadreas have spoken about the visual language, drawing on childhood trauma — figures of authority, domestic settings scaled slightly wrong, cuts that interrupt just as you’re settling. It doesn’t illustrate the song’s themes so much as inhabit them — you feel the loop rather than watch it from a safe distance. The video builds toward Hadreas approaching a billboard spelling out GLORY in bold white letters, himself reflected beneath it — an ending that’s a little on the nose and completely correct.
Immediate and deep, “It’s A Mirror“ is the best possible argument for Perfume Genius still being one of the most vital artists in this space. Rewarding on the first listen and the tenth. Critcheloe‘s video amplifies without crowding, which is harder to pull off than it looks. What comes next is genuinely exciting. The door that was locked on ‘Ugly Season’* is ready to be swung wide open.
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