Perfume Genius

No Shape

There are simultaneous moments of pure beauty and pain, as there have been throughout Perfume Genius' work. Only now perhaps the songs don't search for beauty in suffering, but in vitality despite it.

No Shape, his fourth and most immediate album, embraces the lush orchestration that he's previously only teased.

With such a range of musical stylings on one record, No Shape occasionally sounds more like a collection of songs than a unified album, at times this can be a bit stifling to the listener ... But these are minor flaws in a record with many a moment of gorgeousness.

Though No Shape shows how much his music has expanded since the Learning days, it also proves he hasn't lost any of his ability to connect with listeners. Instead, it reveals him as a sonic adventurer and truth teller who's made some of his most compulsively listenable music.

With his third record he edged slowly towards the mainstream, but with No Shape, he might just have snuck in. Now sober and settled down, it feels like this is his natural home; his previous records were part of a cathartic process, almost medicinal, to help him reach this point.

These pop-forward moments are frontloaded on No Shape, extravagant and baroque. The soaring production value is not accompanied by conceptual upending or reinvention, but rather extends into a grand sort of sequel vision of Perfume Genius. 

No Shape is Perfume Genius' grandest and most eclectic musical statement to date.

Here, we have Hadreas’s desire to transcend his body and self – the no shape of the title – and glorious, inventive, shape-shifting music to match.

As its title suggests, No Shape is playfully elusive, and the album is often content simply to create beauty while remaining agnostic about what lies beneath its surface. The result is an ironically more luminous and even joyful listen than the darker Too Bright.

His fourth Perfume Genius LP ... by his standards feels startlingly optimistic, with pop and rock tropes queered into dreamlike scenarios.

I shouldn’t have first listened to Perfume Genius’ fourth album with a hangover. In this depleted state all ‘No Shape’ does is push the burgeoning headache around my brain, very slowly, producing a sensation like thin metallic worms boring right into the grey matter.