June 2022, in terms of music, was a slight improvement over past months, offering a multitude of enjoyable, if largely insignificant, releases. Two of my favorite records from the past month include Post Malone’s hedonistic pop on Twelve-Carat Toothache and the anxious power pop of Weezer’s SZNZ: Summer EP. Ultimately, though, the release I found myself returning to most this month was Perfume Genius’s avant-garde art pop album Ugly Season.

Perfume Genius is the stage name of Michael Hadreas, who has been creating some of the most exciting and forward-thinking pop music around since his 2010 debut album Learning. With every release, the Perfume Genius sound has evolved, taking on new influences and incorporating more complex textures and instrumental palettes. From the minimalistic chamber pop of 2012’s Put Your Back N 2 It—my personal favorite Perfume Genius release—to the maximalist neo-psychedelia of 2020’s Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, every new Perfume Genius album has pushed more boundaries and expanded Hadreas’s musical landscape. 

Ugly Season is an outlier in the Perfume Genius discography; though Hadreas has certainly embraced harsh, experimental soundscapes at certain moments in past songs (see: “Queen” and “Sides”), his music has nearly always been rooted in a pop tradition, with songs following a customary verse-chorus structure. Of course, there have been some deviations from this formula, as Hadreas has always been one to push boundaries, but not until Ugly Season have pop conventions been so thoroughly rejected in favor of sprawling abstract timbres and surreal instrumentation. This change in sound is especially remarkable given that the previous Perfume Genius album, Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, is arguably his most accessible, consisting largely of psychedelic pop songs. 

Aside from the aptly titled “Pop Song,” there are no choruses and very few earworm melodies to be found on Ugly Season. Even “Pop Song” itself experiments with textures, featuring stuttering synths and sparse vocals from Hadreas. Each track is incredibly unique, featuring its own distinctive soundscape. Despite the lack of traditional song structures and melodies, every track is distinctly memorable—the result of incredibly detailed sonic environments sculpted by Hadreas and primary mixer/producer Blake Mills. In fact, Ugly Season feels less like a collection of individual tracks and much more like a sound sculpture. Despite often featuring vastly different instrumentation, each track flows naturally into the next, making the album feel like a genuinely cohesive piece of work. Hadreas and Mills sculpt their vision with textures and timbres, creating an atmospheric, hypnotic, and, at times, ominous work of art that sounds like an auditory representation of the album’s cover: abstract, flowing, ephemeral, yet intensely human, staring into the listener with pained eyes. I sincerely hope that the Perfume Genius artistic trajectory continues along this track; while I love the melodic, catchy art pop he has previously released, the dissonant and ethereal soundscapes of Ugly Season are, ironically, much more memorable.

Sources:

Perfume Genius – Wikipedia

Ugly Season – Wikipedia