Perfume Genius shares short film Pygmalion’s Ugly Season

On Friday, Mike Hadreas a.k.a. Perfume Genius will share his new album Ugly Season. The new music was created more collaboratively than ever before, beginning as a soundtrack for a dance piece by Kate Wallich and Hadreas called The Sun Still Burns Here with producer Blake Mills and Hadreas's partner Alan Wyffels contributing to the composition. Accompanying the new album is a short film Pygmalion’s Ugly Season directed by visual artist Jacolby Satterwhite, who takes the new Perfume Genius music and its choreography into surreal 3D landscapes. Watch above

“I gave him free reign,” Hadreas said in a press release of Satterwhite's direction. “We're both the same age, I feel very aligned with Jacolby when it comes to taste and certain pop culture obsessions. There is also a spiritual harmony between us in the way we approach work and the similar energetic spaces we want to inhabit, realize and share."

“My visual narrative serendipitously mirrors the lyrical direction in his music," Satterwhite wrote, "it’s a rare, like-minded bond. It’s a creation myth. How do you architecturally mold and render an idealized version of utopia? It’s about making something that you desire so beyond your scope that it’s hard to grapple into a concrete form.”

On June 1, Perfume Genius appeared on "Spitting Off the Edge of the World," the comeback single from New York art-punk icons the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. His fifth album Set My Heart on Fire Immediately was released in 2020. Revisit his 2017 FADER cover story here.