Last week, Mike Hadreas released Glory, his latest album as Perfume Genius. Unsurprisingly, it's tender and shape-shifting, which Ryan Leas further explored in last week's interview with him. Last night, on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon Hadreas performed album opener "It's A Mirror," which he had described to Leas as "the most plainspoken mission statement of the record. It’s a soup of all the things I was thinking about the last few years."
"It's A Mirror" ebbs and flows as Hadreas interrogates isolating mental strife. He detailed that it's about forcing oneself out of these paralyzing moments: "I wake up overwhelmed even when nothing is going on. I spend the rest of the day trying to regulate, which I prefer to do at home alone with my thoughts. But why? They are mostly bad. They also haven't really changed for decades. I wrote 'It's a Mirror' while stuck in one of these isolating loops, seeing that something different and maybe even beautiful is out there but not quite knowing how to venture out. I have a lot more practice keeping the door closed."
As is probably true with the rest of Glory, "It's A Mirror" rips live, swiftly changing its tip-toe pace into a sprint for the chorus. On stage, there's plenty of fog, flashing lights, and even a rotating chair. The performance's theatrics are simple, but no less impactful. Hadreas and company (including Flock Of Dimes’ Jenn Wasner filling in for Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy) are able to mirror the escalating mental panic, when everyday anxiety cancerously grows into a spiral of intrusive thoughts. Watch it below.
Glory is out now via Matador.
