Perfume Genius Explains His Credit Card Statement
The indie-rock icon brings his signature humor and vulnerability to the table while talking about vapes, dog treats, and gambling in ‘Second Life.’
Credit History is an interview series where we ask our favorite artists to comb through their credit card statements and tell us about what they bought, from the necessary to the frivolous to the outlandish.
Mike Hadreas has been working through something in therapy, and maybe—just maybe—he’s made a breakthrough. “Usually before a record, I’ll become really diligent about exercising and eating well, and I just don’t have it in me anymore,” Hadreas tells me over Zoom from his Los Angeles home, with his dog Petunia and longtime partner Alan Wyffels shuffling around in the background. “And if I don’t do it, then I assume I’m gonna fail, which is so vain. ‘No one’s going to like your music unless you’re fully snatched all the time.’ Not true but it’s built into me. My therapist was like, ‘What if you showed up exactly as you are?’ That’s kind of what I’ve been doing lately, and it seems to be going good?”
The 43-year-old singer-songwriter who performs as Perfume Genius seems to be doing better than “good,” if our delightful chat and his explosive new album Glory are any indication. He’s orange-y blonde now and a little tan, looking more like an actor than a frontman. In the fantastical-yet-rustic videos for recent singles “No Front Teeth” and “It’s a Mirror,” he wears an effortless blend of designer and Amazon duds while getting mixed up in supernatural happenings in a weird old house in Kansas City. For once he wanted the clips to move like a film, to all connect and ambiguously complement the album, which he likens to “a journal cracked open.” Hadreas adds, “The risk of it is that it could have been really bad.”
Thankfully, the videos feel wonderfully Lynchian, down to the part where Hadreas considers the house where they shot—and the family living there, who guest in the clips—to be a crucial part of the atmosphere around the record. I can’t help but think of the real woman who lives in Laura Palmer’s house in the Twin Peaks universe, and how she showed up in The Return. It makes a lot of sense when, a few minutes later, Hadreas brings up buying the whole Twin Peaks series on iTunes while we discuss some of his credit card charges of late.
Read on for more of Perfume Genius’s recent purchases, from his weekly Thai massage to a TikTok-coded steam cleaner.
