The music itself is not what I would normally find myself called to during summer, but the name certainly is apt for its sound. Ugly Season is a 52-minute tour de force from Michael Alden Hadreas, better known as Perfume Genius. 

Despite rave reviews and a handful of tracks I enjoyed, much of his previous work did little to move me. But from the get-go, his sixth LP is something else entirely. The opening notes took me back to Typhoon's 2018 epic Offerings and subsequent tunes returned me there thematically more so than instrumentally. A cinematic and often bleak affair, Ugly Season builds on previous high points of Hadreas' catalog, but leans fully into a dark beauty never too far beneath the surface for Perfume Genius.