Perfume Genius Knows Where It Hurts

Mike Hadreas wrote Dark Parts as a kind of offering—here is the worst of me, the parts I keep hidden, and I’m handing them to you anyway. It’s on Put Your Back N 2 It, his second record, where the piano is still spare and the production barely exists and his voice sounds like it could break at any moment but never quite does. The song asks to be loved completely, not just the presentable version of a person but the dark interior stuff too—the shame, the history, the things you don’t name out loud. It’s a devastatingly simple request. Hadreas makes it sound like the bravest thing in the world.