When No Shape, Perfume Genius’s 2017 album, came out, I was really not about it. At that point, I mostly sought out his music to feel sad and wrecked. My favorite album of his was still Put Your Back N 2 It, and I wanted more of those songs of heartbreak and loss. I wanted desolate and lonely. No Shape was not that. It was big and sparkling and lush. It was intimate. It was intimate in a way that, shockingly, disturbingly, didn’t immediately smack of pain, but of comfort and security, or at least a striving for that, a working toward the utter peace that close familiarity can engender. I didn’t want peace; I wanted unsettledness. I wanted those songs that made me cry with their images of love strung up on a fence and cast away forever and Hadreas’s repeated, anguished utterances of the word “baby,” as in “you would never call me baby / if you knew the truth” and “baby, the center will bloom / with or without you.”
So I just wasn’t that into No Shape. But a friend of mine, who I had introduced to Perfume Genius, kept insisting to me that I needed to listen to it, that it was so good. I kept trying it and found myself reaching for the song “Sides,” which felt the most like those older songs, with its dripping pleas of “baby, if it ain’t easy to love me / cut the cord and set me free.”
I am not always exactly sure what makes certain albums click into place when they do. That’s the case with No Shape, though of course I have some inklings, some secret sense of where all that chafing against its earnest love songs was coming from, some creeping clue about why the idea of a love that makes you breathe in deep comfort made me scrunch up my face in dismissive disbelief.
But I’ve been trying to be alive for long enough to know that living mostly means suspending disbelief and just letting things happen to you. So I did, and I braced myself as No Shape’s first song “Otherside” blooms finally into its fullness, cymbals and drums exploding hard and chimes and harps and who knows what else glittering all around Hadreas’s falsetto, which, my God, could it be more beautiful, or more brave, to float in a cappella like that, knowing all that noise is coming on its heels.
Even after I got into No Shape, I still overlooked its last song, “Alan.” “Alan” follows two sexily suggestive songs that bleed into one another, “Braid” and “Run Me Through,” their sultriness a little lewd in the way we turn to vulgarity to mask tenderness, humor to mask nerves, the way we distort vulnerability into violence to make it more shocking, less touching. But what is there if not tenderness lying underneath lyrics like “wear me like leather / just for you” — and “Alan” lays all that tenderness bare. It’s three minutes of cloudy, ample synths anchored by a heavy keyboard and the weighty peace created out of mutual and complete knowledge between two people. Hadreas sings the first line — “Did you notice / we sleep through the night?” — at the low end of his register, pensive and bowled-over, suspended in the awe of having finally found a love with whom he can “rest easy.” He’s maybe a little sad, too — sad that it’s taken him this long to get there, that he had to suffer through the wrong thing or things before, that there were nights he didn’t sleep through.
I overlooked “Alan” maybe for the same reason that I overlooked No Shape, which is likely that I just wasn’t ready for that sort of overwhelming closeness. But then I listened to the rework. If the version of “Alan” on No Shape reveals a deep intimacy, then the rework from 2018 takes that intimacy and places it directly between your lungs. There are no synths here, no artifice; the song is huge by virtue of just a few pieces of classical instrumentation — piano, strings. And then Hadreas’s voice, just as brave as in “Otherside,” throwing itself high in exaltation:
You need me
Rest easy
I’m here
How weird
How weird indeed, to have all of his expectations surpassed and his predictions proven wrong, to find himself coming out of hiding thanks to someone who’s made him brave enough to show himself (“never thought I’d sing outside,” he sings in the second verse). This song feels impossible, improbable, just like the life-changing love to which it pays tribute. It stretches out, long, long, long, its mere three minutes tracing a line around an eternity, like how could they not last forever, how could this love not last forever. And yet for all its bigness, “Alan” carries the simplicity of things finally being as they should be. It all feels so natural that you might miss it if you don’t pay attention, if someone doesn’t ask you, did you notice?
P.S. If you are going to listen to No Shape, which, obviously, I recommend you do, I also recommend that you do absolutely nothing else while you listen. Just sit in a room with the blinds drawn and the lights off. Maybe you can lie in bed or on a sofa. If you’re bad at sitting still, don’t worry, it’s only 43 minutes, and don’t worry, they will absolutely hold you in place.
This is one of several pieces on Perfume Genius. You can read the other ones here, here, here, and here.