After two albums of piano ballads spare, fragile and confessional, Perfume Genius unleashed a more aggressive side on "Too Bright," and turned out one of the more acclaimed albums of 2014.
The most quoted line came in the song "Queen," an icy synth-rocker from the David Bowie/Gary Numan school in which Mike Hadreas (who is Perfume Genius) preys on straight America's gay fears with the line, "No family is safe when I sashay."
The song and lyric was something of a game changer for the Seattle songwriter.
"When I wrote it I thought it was a good line," he says. "It's kind of [gutsy], so either someone could find it cringeworthy or people could think it's really badass."
Of course, "Queen" and the rest of "Too Bright" wouldn't have the same impact without the additional sonic heft supplied by Adrian Utley (Portishead guitarist), who produced along with John Parish.
"I brought a bunch of demos of the songs, all fully fleshed out as far as mood and tension and stuff like that, but I wasn't technically capable of pushing them in the direction I wanted to go and he was," Mr. Hadreas says. "He knew what machines and what synths would fit and he was able to suggest things that worked. He knew what the songs were about and was unafraid to be as dark and weird or quiet and tender, whatever the song called for."
Creating songs like "Queen," "Grid," "My Body" and the jarring Gaga-like videos that accompany some of them required him to shake off past limitations in both the studio and on stage.
"I thought I could only make kind of very patient, slow music and just tell stories, essentially that I could only make music the way I had been," he says. "I made these songs knowing the performance was going to have to be different because I was going to be singing more just on my own and not be behind the piano, and I was probably going to have to move instead of just stand there if I was going to make it interesting. That was intimidating at first but now that I've been touring it I have at least one or two signature moves that I make. They're not super complex or anything but they're at least movements that hopefully have like a touch of charisma."
The new music requires him to travel with a second musician, playing guitar and bass, and also, he says, "I have to think full outfit not just the shirt."
He found inspiration, and confidence, in the form of Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs moves onstage and in the sinister smile of PJ Harvey.
"When I go to shows I look for that moment when the singer or the band looks like they're losing their mind, when they forget they're even on stage, some kind of weird divine moment, and so I guess I try to do that -- get into some weird feverish state where I'm not thinking at all and I'm super into, and to be honest I don't know how cool that looks."
On his last trip to Pittsburgh he played a quiet piano set to a noisy crowd at Altar Bar opening for Beirut. The reception should be more polite Friday as part of the Sound Series at The Andy Warhol Museum.
It's a flamboyant pop artist playing in the shrine of another flamboyant pop artist, but the similarities may end there.
"I'm not going to pretend that I know enough about [Warhol] or his work to talk really smartly about it," Mr. Hadreas says, "but if I have quotes right, he was saying that art should not be about anything and I kind of think the opposite way, 100 percent. I'm very much a hippie about things and the way I make music I want it to be a therapy for me and for other people, and I want everything to have importance and be about something, so I don't know if he'd be into that, but we're both gay, so people can talk about that."
First Published: March 26, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
