Perfume Genius is returning on May 5 with No Shape, his first album since 2014’s Too Bright. While Bright was a star-making album, our first taste of the new album shows that it might be even bigger. “Slip Away” is brighter and campier than anything Genius has ever done.
The clip for the video is a Victorian romp based on movies like Thelma & Louise with strange villainous man-children and natural scenes that become painted backdrops. It makes as much sense as it sounds like it does but the colors and shots are so captivating that it doesn’t matter. Director Andrew Thomas Huang tried to make sense of it to The Fader, who also debuted the clip.
“Mike [Hadreas] said that the album, and “Slip Away” particularly, had a lot to do with finding kinship and companionship with his female friends,” he said. “He told me the song was about that intimate, blood-oath kind of friendship where it’s you two against the world. We talked about movies like Thelma & Louise, and Celine and Julie Go Boating — movies about friends who are close in an “I would die for you” way. There’s usually some kind of outer force that’s threatening them, that they have to run away from.”
Huang says he came up with the idea to have Perfume Genuis on the lam from “Trump gremlins.”
“They’re like two sisters on the run from the man, you know?” he said. “They had to be running from something, so I had the idea of them running from little schoolboys, but we would cast old men that kind of look like Donald Trump. So we created these Trump gremlins that organically became the villains of this fairy tale world. I just wanted the video to be melodramatic, fun, but also campy.”
Check it out up top.
