Crack Mag

PERFUME GENIUS

Editor's Pick

Review by Ryan Dombal

The debut from Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, and drummer Tom Skinner’s new group is instantly, unmistakably the best album yet by a Radiohead side project.

8.6/10 When Thom Yorke introduced his new band at their first gig a year ago, he took a moment to explain their name. “Not the Smile as in ha ha ha,” he said, his faux laugh echoing eerily, “more the Smile of the guy who lies to you every day.” Of course, no one figured that the most uncannily accurate doomsayer of the modern age was taking a sharp left to clown town with his latest project, but the Smile are not just aimed at shifty politicians, either. Their pearly grins are myriad, taking inspiration from smiles of love and deceit, bloody smiles and blissful ones, smiles that mend and smiles that destroy. At 53, Yorke has seen them all. And once again, he’s battling the absurdity of existence the only way he knows how: by offering a salve for his anxieties without letting anyone off the hook for turning everything we hold dear into one big joke.

Rating: 8.6 Genre: Rock Label: XL Reviewed: 12 May, 2022

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This bid for transcendence amid chaos isn’t the only thing that’s familiar about the Smile. The trio also includes Yorke’s main songwriting partner in Radiohead, Jonny Greenwood, along with drummer Tom Skinner, whose eclectic resume includes work with jazz-funk explorers Sons of Kemet, electronic fusionist Floating Points, and UK rapper Kano. It’s the first time Yorke and Greenwood have collaborated on a major project outside of their main gig, and, not coincidentally, A Light for Attracting Attention sounds more like a proper Radiohead album than any of the numerous side projects the band’s members have done on their own.

We’ve got Greenwood’s lattice-like fingerpicking and saintly electric guitar tone. There’s Yorke’s voice, still in pristine form, wailing like an angel in limbo and gnashing like a punk who woke up on the wrong side of the gutter. There are synths

The Smile: A Light For Attracting Attention and Greenwood’s sidelong orchestral flourishes signaling end times. Longtime producer Nigel Godrich is in the control room, giving each sound an immense and terrifying and beautiful glow.

A Light for Attracting Attention starts with a duet of sorts between Yorke and Greenwood called “The Same.” It’s the only song on the album that doesn’t feature any other players—no drums, no strings, no horns. On the track, Yorke offers a plea for human connection.

“We are all the same, please,” he sings, emphasizing the last word like a man facing the barrel of a gun. “The Same” begins with a spare synthesizer throb vaguely reminiscent of Kid A opener “Everything in Its Right Place” that serves as the song’s heartbeat. But as it goes on, more and more sounds slowly surround that pulse, like so many nattering voices sowing discord. A repetitive piano figure bobs up and down. The modular tones begin to swarm and then fray at the edges. The effect is disorienting, almost frightening. Even if we are the same, the song seems to suggest, the static we drift through every day is working overtime to keep us apart.

From there, the album alternately combats the horrors of modern life with roiling anger and Zen-like serenity. It churns through an all-too-common cycle: see red, get fed up, take a few very deep breaths, do it all over again. A Light for Attracting Attention’s stiffest middle finger comes with “You Will Never Work in Television Again,” the most raucous Radiohead-related track since Hail to the Thief’s “2 + 2 = 5” nearly two decades ago. Armed with three distorted chords that could have filled CBGB in 1977, Yorke puts on his best sneer while standing up to a “gangster troll” who’s lording his power over an aspiring young woman. As Yorke growls out

lines like, “Take your dirty hands off my love/Heaven knows where else you’ve been,” you can practically see the spittle leave his lips.

When the Smile aren’t venting, they’re surfing the slime, reaching for specks of pleasure and solace wherever they can find them. “The Smoke” is a beguiling waft of understated funk that sounds like a collaboration between Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti and Marvin Gaye—thanks to Yorke’s wobbling bassline and falsetto moans hinting at sensuality and self-immolation, it’s the sexiest thing he’s ever set to tape.

The time Yorke and Greenwood spend traveling through their own history reaches a heady apex on another weightless elegy that flows like entrance music for the afterlife. “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus,” Yorke sings over celestial synths on “Open the Floodgates,” evoking a classic rock cliché he’s spent a lifetime trying to dismantle.

“We want the good bits/Without your bullshit/And no heartaches.”

This internal monologue has been taking up space in the singer’s mind since at least the In Rainbows era in 2006, when Radiohead first sound-checked a version of the song. Its numbness in the face of impending death goes back even further, to OK Computer’s “No Surprises,” and Greenwood’s gently chiming guitar recalls “Let Down” from that same 25-year-old album. When the hook does arrive, it’s fraught and spare. “Someone lead me out the darkness,” Yorke repeats, as the cloud of synths begins to dissolve behind him. It’s an appeal that doubles as a pact between artist and audience—a pact that dredges resilience out from the abyss, that asks for absolution so we can receive it. A pact that, through it all, remains intact.

A Light For Attracting Attention is out 13 May via XL Recordings

ALBUM REVIEW 3

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Words by Michelle Hyun Kim

Salamanda creates imagined worlds

salamanda

that feel both familiar and strange.

It’s almost midnight in South Korea, but Sala and Manda are fully awakened by the thought of having magic powers.

“I want to control mother nature,” 29-year-old Manda (who also goes by Yetsuby) exclaims from her dark kitchen in Seoul, her eyes round with childlike delight.

“Like, if you spread your arms and all the grass [starts to] grow,” 30-year-old Sala (who also works as Uman Therma) adds from her bedroom in the neighbouring province of Gyeonggi, before gently sweeping her arm in front of her. We all giggle, as we envision imaginary owners sprouting across the screen of our video call.

Salamanda create bewitching soundscapes that transport listeners to vivid environments that feel both alien and familiar.

These enveloping tracks, built on a foundation of modular synths, bear the rhythms of minimalists like Steve Reich, the “fourth world” sounds of Jon Hassell, and the whimsical sensibilities of soundtrack composers like Joe Hisaishi, who scored most of Miyazaki’s films, and Koji Kondo, who conjured the music for Super Mario. But to make it all theirs, Salamanda incorporate their own voices and samples of the world around them, from bird calls to barely detectable noise.

These tactile sounds become hallucinatory details, creating dimension amid a trance of electronic patterns, akin to how a hyper-realistic detail SALAMANDA 5

in the background of a video game will suddenly inspire awe. The samples contribute to the “visual life story” of the songs, Sala explains. Later, she adds: “I believe when you look at one thing closely enough, you’ll find any [kind] of inspiration.”

The duo have captivated a growing worldwide audience with their enchanting ambient music, shared across numerous EPs and projects, including Allez on Good Morning Tapes and, most recently, the Métron-released album Sphere. Last August, they were invited to Berlin to play their first overseas set. For Sala and Manda, escaping dreary everyday life, which still includes day jobs (Manda works at a clothing brand, while Sala works at a local record store), is certainly one of the goals. “I wish I could go [back to the fantasy worlds of my childhood], but I have [too much] realistic information now, so it’s really difficult,” Manda explains. “But when I’m making music, I feel like I can go there [again].”

Salamanda’s ascent is all the more impressive considering that the duo only met in 2018. After connecting through a mutual friend, the two quickly found out that they shared an affinity for minimalist music.

Within three months, they agreed to start Salamanda, a project “where we can be free making music that we love”, as Manda describes it.

They regularly met to eat gopchang, a popular grilled offal dish, at a restaurant where they ended up determining their group’s name, their schedule and other logistics amid the lingering scent of sizzling meat.

I wish I could go back to the fantasy worlds of my childhood…

When I’m making music, I feel like I can go there again.– Manda The idea for the name was born from a random salamander doodle made by Sala, who creates all the nostalgic pixel art for each Salamanda release. Inspired by the natural habitat of the amphibian, the duo named their debut 2019 track and project, Our Lair. Then, with their 2020 Glass Cage EP, the pair signaled that they were, as Sala explains, “going out into the world”. “It was a story of a bird coming out of a cage, like how a salamander comes out from a den.” These early songs mirrored this sense of exploration and curiosity by including rhythms and samples that can sometimes resemble Korean and Japanese folk music, though at other times aren’t quite placeable. These regional sounds, Sala explains, “have a certain charm – something that you’re still not familiar with, but at the same time you get attracted to. There’s something that makes you want to listen to it again and again.”

On their newest album, Salamanda wanted to set a more abstract concept. For Sphere, they decided that any kind of spherical object could spark an idea for a song. “Like boiled tomatoes or planet Earth, or maybe bubbles,” Sala lists off, while Manda illustrates her collaborator’s words by making little circle shapes with her fingers.

As a result, Sphere became their most cohesive project yet. Each mesmerising song – from the submarine-plunging dramatics of The Big Blue to the wet rain forest textures of Puddle Underwater – is a multicolored vignette that captures the expansive universe of Salamanda. Importantly, the two believe their approach left room for people to bring their own narratives to each piece.

“We want to spark people’s creativity [with our music],” Manda says. “I think I like that more, leaving it up to the listener.”

Sala and Manda both grew up with stories in their heads, sparked by the imagination-colouring soundtracks of film composers: Hisaishi, Ennio Morricone, Hans

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Zimmer and John Williams. (James Horner’s Titanic soundtrack is a personal favourite for Manda, while Sala lists off Disney scores like The Lion King and The Little Mermaid.)

Manda knew she wanted to be an artist from the age of four, and her parents supported her as she learned piano at a young age and eventually majored in music composition at both high school and college.

Sala, on the other hand, always felt that music was just out of reach. She remembers being 14 years old, watching her friends play in the orchestra, and thinking, “‘Oh, I wish I could be there,’” Sala recalls. “That’s when I realised I wanted to do music.” A major turning point arrived in 2014, when Sala experienced UK club culture for the first time during an eightmonth stay at the University of Portsmouth as an exchange student. “While being there, I got this feeling [that] I have to do things that I want to do before it gets too late,” Sala reveals.

Coincidentally, both Sala and Manda took up DJing and Ableton production in 2018, before they met. In those days, Sala contributed a few tracks while Manda made a project that featured birdsong she recorded during a trip to New Zealand. But the two have discovered that there’s a special “synergy” when they work together. Each production starts with a simple sketch made from humming and “playing around with our synthesiser”, Manda

I believe when you look at one thing closely enough, you’ll find any kind of inspiration­– Sala outlines. “It’s really fun to start developing from the sounds that we accidentally [find].”

Salamanda also tease that they have a new project – whose concept they’re keeping a “secret” for now – coming out in the spring via the New York label Human Pitch. Sala grins like she’s got something up her sleeve. Currently, the two hope to travel more, if only because they believe that expanding their physical and musical universes go hand in hand.

Sala wants to explore the world in order to have more of these unexpected experiences. Because if other places can be a portal to music, she says, then Salamanda’s music can, in turn, open a portal to a whole new world. One of their own making.

Overdose is out on 21 May via Human Pitch.

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Perfume Genius is finding a new freedom in physicality ­—

and nobody is more surprised than him.

† Words by Eve Harlow

It’s Valentine’s Day morning at a café by the East LA River, and Seattle native Mike Hadreas shows up looking every inch the rugged heartthrob. His jeans are a vintage wash, his tank top is soft against his chest, his hair peppered with grey. He struts in leather boots with piercing blue eyes like a

Hollywood pin-up. As alternative pop star Perfume Genius, Hadreas performs in many guises: shiny oversized suits with stilettos; costumes that flash David Bowie by way of a Victorian workhouse; skin-tight metallic vests. Today he abandons androgyny. He is 39 years old, and also somehow a boy.

“It’s very confusing,” he says, contemplating his gender presentation. His fifth album, Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, due in May, feels like an extension of this playful new chapter. Not least because the artwork for lead single Describe features Hadreas wielding a sledgehammer, while PERFUME GENIUS 9

the LP’s gate-fold image sees him draped over a motorcycle in an image reminiscent of Kenneth Anger’s 1969 art film Scorpio Rising, a meditation on homoeroticism, bikers and 60s pop. “I wanted to be covered in dirt, that’s how I feel right now,” he shrugs when questioned. “I don’t know what the ingredients are, or what’s seasoning it. I actually like being a man. I don’t know why! I feel like one – a man.”

For Hadreas, gender is continually in flux, and something he occasionally talks about with frustration, as if reaching for a language that’s always being rewritten. “I’m figuring it all out as I go. I’m figuring it out in front of people,” he says. His last record, 2017’s shimmering and baroque No Shape, was worlds away from the emotionally raw, trauma-steeped records with which he made his name. Instead, it gloried in the love for his partner Alan Wyffels, elevating romance to decadent heights. But the way he presented then doesn’t feel like him anymore. “It feels weird to be so specific about clothes and presentation, it’s a tender thing.” Perhaps it’s easier to say that he simply finds a strange satisfaction in exploring and subverting, well, whatever it is. “I just want to carry a sledgehammer around now, I want to fight people,” he laughs, before qualifying, “that’s not purely a masculine thing but I’ve been taught that it is.”

Self-exploration has always been a core element of the Perfume Genius project, with its earliest roots in recovery.

Hadreas began recording music in 2005, after spending 20 days in a Seattle rehab centre for drug addiction, following a four-year stint living in New York City. He set tales of his troubled youth – abuse, suicide, ill mental health – to piano and posted them to 10 CRACK ⁄ MAY 2022

“I’m ready for a big feeling, it doesn’t matter what it is. As long as it happens.

Right away!”

MySpace. These emotionally spare tracks would become his debut album Learning and, listening to them now, feel like a form of therapy. Accordingly, follow-up Put Your Back N 2 It radiated with warmth and a profound hopefulness, while Too Bright, released in 2014, and No Shape, out three years later, captured an artist coming into his own. On defiant single Queen he even weaponised his queerness to exact revenge on heteronormative society: “No family is safe/When I sashay”.

Hadreas spent most of the 2010s in Tacoma, Washington, building a home with Wyffels, a classically trained musician who often plays in Hadreas’ live band. This newfound domesticity suited their sobriety but it soon began to feel claustrophobic when they came off the road. “There wasn’t a lot of good food there, I don’t want to be too shady,” he quips. The couple moved to Los Angeles two years ago where they have friends and more excuses to

Corset & Leather Belt: Vintage

Mask: Nick Rademacher Shirt: Desiree Klein Trousers: Helmut Lang SS 2004 Mummy Trousers: Artifact New York Shoes: Vintage

leave the house. Then, last winter, Hadreas returned to New York City for one of his most ambitious projects yet.

The Sun Still Burns Here is a collaboration between Hadreas and choreographer Kate Wallich.

Running in Chelsea’s Joyce Theatre across one week in November last year, the performance piece was described

by Wallich as an “opera Janet Jackson musical ballet” and featured music exclusively

composed by Hadreas, including the dramatic nine-minute opus Eye in the Wall. He even performed in it, alongside Wyffels and Wallich’s dance company The YC. Hadreas had never danced professionally before – he and Wyffels learned together. It was embarrassing, he admits. “We’re not super young anymore! It shook a lot of stuff out of us. For me I’ve always had a weird relationship with my body because I was sick growing up. I’m still

sick.” He’s referring to Crohn’s disease, which he has suffered from since he was a child.

A few years ago, for the first time in his adult life, he was in remission. Dance allowed his relationship with his body to change. Hadreas demanded more from it. In class he would cry from elation, he admits. Sat across the table from me, he starts extending his arm like a ballerina and folding it in front of his face to explain. “I’d look PERFUME GENIUS 11

Corset, Leather Belt & Boots: Vintage Jacket: Helmut Lang AW 1999 Silk Organza Moto Jacket: Artifact New York Shorts: Desiree Klein

at my arm, consider my arm, and start crying, ‘I’ve never been present with my arm!’”

He scoffs at how ridiculous it sounds. “Like – be nice to your arm.” The show inspired a physical intimacy between Hadreas and other people. He developed a passion for weight transference; lifting, being lifted. “I liked carrying people,” he smiles. “It’s healing. It’s a nonsensical bizarre thing to crave but when people get close to me now, I just want to pick them up!” He reveled in being responsible for the physicality of others, the harmony of it. New song Your Body Changes Everything on the album is about just that: “And now you’re right above me and your shadow suffocates,” he sings.

“I was truly in remission in a way I hadn’t been – and that’s over now.” He sighs, momentarily tearful that the illness returned just as he was exploring his own physicality. “I was getting off on how much control I felt I had over [my body]. I learned when I was young that your body just does stuff. You have no control. You’re almost riding it, you know? If I exercise things will grow. Just because I am sick again, in my body and spirit, 12 CRACK ⁄ MAY 2022

I know that I have access. That will make it easier to go back.”

Throughout our conversation I sense a defiance to Hadreas’ spirit. His demeanour is intense and fragile, but strong. He experiences moments of connection and joy, making small talk about inconsequential things: the size of the table, the weather, a small dog that comes over to greet us. He isn’t trying to be opaque when discussing some topics – like gender, or his health – he just seems incapable of articulating them fully. Maybe the music speaks for him, and maybe that’s always been the case. We reminisce about a time we met previously, at Latitude Festival in 2012. It was in a caravan that a music blog had set up for sessions with performers and Hadreas had come to perform Madonna’s Oh Father on his keyboard. I’ve never forgotten it, the most nervous performance I’ve ever witnessed. He shook throughout, working through whatever was affecting him that day with that song. Today he is less nervous than he was then. Yet,

in spite of his willing company, his radiance, his talk of sledgehammers and physicality, a shade of self doubt lingers. He seems conflicted. He scratches his hands. “I’m not very confident talking about how I feel right now. I don’t have a handle on it,” he says, eyes darting.

“It’s not fun. But it’s thrilling.”

Set My Heart on Fire Immediately sees Hadreas reuniting with producer Blake Mills for an album that leans into moments of swooning Americana – a conscious decision, he explains. The opening track Whole Life sets the tone, sounding a little like an update of Unchained Melody, and there are nods to 50s American pop circa the Everly Brothers, Elvis and Buddy Holly throughout. Crucially, the nostalgic charge is subverted by the subject matter – paeans to queer desire written in classic melodies. “There’s something about me doing that,” he smiles. “I’ve listened to those songs my whole life but don’t feel included in them.” He was inspired by swaggering cowboys PERFUME GENIUS 13

who were vulnerable and unafraid to share, writing himself into the history he was raised on. On reflection, Hadreas himself admits that No Shape was written from a place of restraint aspiring to freedom. Set My Heart on Fire Immediately is the response: full-bodied, unsuppressed.

Of the tracks on the album, Jason is his most direct and confessional. Hadreas documents a sexual encounter aged 23 with a man called Jason. It was Jason’s first time. “Jason there’s no rush/ I know a lot comes up letting in some love/ Where there always should have been some”. In the morning as he left, Hadreas took $20 from Jason’s jean pocket. Reflecting on it now, he felt he had performed a service. “What was needed from me was a kindness to someone who was figuring something out. I felt like I was able to do that, even if just for 30 seconds,” he says. “That relationship was brief, but I think about all my relationships, even if it was just a night. I’m hungry for all of it right now.”

This potent sexuality courses through the album.

On Describe, Hadreas talks about his stomach rumbling for someone (“Can you just find him for me?”); The cinematic, strings-adorned Leave sees the singer, “begging like a dog, ignore me”; Just a Touch makes mention of a “secret” lover.

It all sounds forbidden. Within this context, the album’s title becomes a demand – a call to burn down everything and start over. “I’m ready for a big feeling,” he says, by way of explanation. “It doesn’t matter what it is. As long as it happens.

Right away!” Hadreas cackles. When I ask him what it is he craves, he moves his arms up and down trying to reach for something above him.

He’s worried that the emotion he chases is the longing itself, and despite his declarations of being satisfied, he’s finding that maybe he’s not satisfied at all. “It’s never enough,” Hadreas says, of life. “The anticipation of trying to be adjacent to some big thing. That’s the reason I did drugs, I wanted to feel everything and you can’t. I was scared to let any of that back in because you become insatiable – I feel that feeling right now. I feel danger, but I also feel joy.”

As Perfume Genius, Hadreas has become a symbol of radical queer survival, turning his lived experiences into something liberating,

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"I feel relentless, I keep holding onto the good things that I’m learning, to the love that I’m given." transcendent. It saw him writing candidly about loving another man before queer culture went fully mainstream. “That’s always going to sit heavy with me,” he says. “‘Cause I still need it. When I watch a TV show and two men kiss I still cry. The show could be horrible, I could hate them both, but I’m like, ‘Ah it’s happening!’”

These small victories mean a lot when you grow up the only visibly gay student in high school, the target of bullying so severe you’re forced to eventually drop out. “Surviving anything is something you carry by yourself. We carry it together too, but it feels very lonely.” His extroverted, candid character onstage has afforded him a strength that has started to seep into everyday life and has helped to heal old wounds. “I used to be nervous to order at a restaurant. Sometimes I order for everybody now. Maybe I’ve gone too far!” he laughs.

Indeed, it’s been ten years since he first began uploading songs to MySpace. Hadreas is proud of his ability to keep showing up, over and over. “I feel relentless,” he says. “I’m always trying to get better in my own way. That wasn’t always an interest of mine. I keep holding onto the good things that I’m learning, to the love that I’m given,” he pauses. “Even though I’m feeling really unhinged right now.” He tells me that, in this state, he finds comfort in poetry, Texas singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, Gossip Girl (“I had never seen it!”). And, of course, writing songs, which “does something that I can’t figure out how to say or do.”

Then, he tells me how, the other night he decided to get out of the bath and walk to the living room, then back to the bath, and back to the living room, for 45 minutes. “It was the most satisfying thing I’d done all week.” We giggle over the absurdity of it. “I don’t know why! Something’s rewiring.” It must have been a shock to the body, getting in and out of the water, I say. “Oh, I didn’t get in. I went towards the bathtub,” he smirks. “I acknowledged where I’d been. Then I returned again.” † Set My Heart on Fire Immediately is released 15 May via Matador Photography: Charlotte Patmore Styling: Jessica Worrell Makeup: Lilly Keys Hair: Fitch Lunar

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