Bruised and Beautiful: Perfume Genius Turns The Gothic into a Church of Feral Grace on 6/21

Written by Ali DeLambo

Photo by Cody Critcheloe

The alternative artist urika’s bedroom opened the night like a lucid dream unraveling—part shoegaze séance, part bedroom diary spilled out over trembling guitars. Their set was low-lit and intimate, full of distortion and restraint, like something you’d remember in flashes the next morning: warm stage lights, a lyric you can’t quite place, a voice that cut through everything like fog.

Then came the main event—The Glory Tour. And Perfume Genius didn’t just take the stage—he claimed it, like someone returning to a haunted house to light it on fire.

Perfume Genius,  the stage name of Mike Hadreas, stepped onto the Gothic stage in a tight, cropped blue shirt that clung to him like a second skin, his slight frame vibrating with the electric charge of what was about to unfold. “I haven’t played Denver in almost ten years,” he told us. And then, grinning, “When I was a baby, I choked on a chip here and had to go to the hospital.” It landed like a joke, but it felt mythic—another weirdly perfect chapter in the Gothic’s long (supposed) history of ghosts.

What followed wasn’t a concert so much as a reckoning. Hadreas opened with “In a Row,” followed by “It’s a Mirror” and “No Front Teeth”—three songs that bled into each other like chapters in a fever dream. By “Valley,” he was fully possessed, twisting himself across chairs in slow, contorted choreography, like his body was being guided by some other force entirely. It was beautiful and disquieting, graceful and grotesque. It was art.

Hadreas’s music blends art pop, indie rock, and baroque pop, fusing ornate arrangements with guttural emotion. His sound is experimental and elastic, pushing the boundaries of pop into something stranger, deeper, more alive. And yet what anchors it all is his voice—clear, aching, resilient—and his stage presence, which is both powerful and disarmingly intimate. You don’t watch a Perfume Genius show so much as enter it. He draws you in without asking, makes you feel like your heart is being read aloud.

When he launched into “Slip Away,” the euphoric track famously featured in Booksmart, and it felt like the whole room cracked open. It’s the kind of song that makes you feel like the protagonist in an indie film, sprinting through streets at golden hour with everything on the line. Live, it was something even bigger: a cry for freedom so full of ache and light it almost hurt.

From there, he moved through “Left for Tomorrow,” “Me & Angel,” and “Clean Heart” like someone unraveling in front of us. “On the Floor” shimmered with desperate joy. “Describe” stomped and howled. “Wreath” and “Otherside” felt like elegies—tender, ornate, bruised. By the time he reached “Capezio” and “Eye in the Wall,” the show had taken on the energy of a séance—Hadreas dancing like he was summoning something, calling it down into the crowd. “My Body” closed the main set with a raw, relentless urgency.

And then, for the encore, he returned under soft lights and covered Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You.” It was bare and reverent, like a whispered apology to every ghost in the room. Finally, he exploded into “Queen,” and the entire venue surged with him. “No family is safe when I sashay,” we all screamed, and for one glittering moment, it felt like we could burn down every shame we’d ever carried.

Perfume Genius doesn’t traffic in perfection—he gives you something messier, holier. Love, loss, vulnerability, desire—it’s all there, unfiltered. His performances evoke, confront, and crack open. By the end of the night, he looked spent. So did we. But it wasn’t exhaustion—it was something closer to deliverance.

At The Gothic, surrounded by sweat and static and strangers clinging to every note, Perfume Genius reminded us that glory doesn’t have to be loud. Sometimes it’s small and strange and baroque, bent over a chair in a too-small shirt, singing something too honest to name into the dark.