Perfume Genius - Slip Away

With every new album that Mike Hadreas delivers, there are new things to discover in his sound and in his narrative; he is an artist that reinvents himself every time and in his newest single, Slip Away, he arises to monumental heights by expanding the possibilities of what he can offer as a musician and as a creator.

In his previous album, Too Bright, Hadreas upsteped his game, and beyond the intimate raw stories of his two first albums, he proved that he was capable of being at the upfront of sonic experimentations and created dense atmospheres to continue dissecting queerness. After 3 albums of brilliant exploration of the topic, one would have thought he had exhausted the subject, but here he is again, breaking free in a way that we never saw him before, if in Queen he was upfront confrontational, in Slip Away he reaches a point where the hate is not even capable to touch him. He has created something huge out of what made him different, and it is now when he is letting it explode, it's the first time that we see his shiny side, and is as rich and interesting as his gloomy dark side was.

For a track that, in its general form, sounds so brilliant and positive, it has a really unusual selection of the individual components. It opens and grows from an almost tribal playing of the instruments: the sparse beats of the drum, the distorted piano, the metallic sounds of the synths. It's feral and raw, not your average pop track about growing strong to shut the haters, but at the same time is a strong statement, it sparks with ferocity in a way that we never saw after the glam explosion of Bowie and Mercury, putting to shame the Christina Aguilera's Beautiful and Lady Gaga's Born this Way, and who ever else dared to try their luck with a song to shut bullies; Slip Away is pure poetic glittery magic.

If we were to graphic the career of Perfume Genius, it would be a constant ascending line. He has grown in the way that every artist dreams of, offering novelty to music with every new effort while keeping a personal identity that is cohesive to the whole. Hey world, here's the new Mike Hadreas, and it's time for you to listen very carefully, and even if you don't want to, he is gonna be loud and gigantic.