Perfume Genius adds new Duo Tour dates in the UK and North America

Perfume Genius has extended his Duo Tour, adding a run of new North American dates and a one-off London show built around the same stripped-back setup he took on the road earlier this year.

The project, led by Mike Hadreas, is once again anchored by longtime collaborator and co-writer Alan Wyffels. Their partnership is the point here, and Hasdreas has made that plain: Wyffels, he said, was “the first person I ever sang in front of.” The two have played every show together for 15 years, and this new stretch of dates looks back to the earliest version of Perfume Genius live, when the pair were “perched on our keyboards at the front of the stage.”

This time, the Duo Tour will hit six stops in North America across September and October, with shows in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Petaluma, Big Sur and Los Angeles. The run ends with a London date at Union Chapel on October 28, giving the tour a neatly split geography that mirrors the project’s pared-down premise.

Tickets are on sale now, with UK tickets available here and North America tickets here.

Hadreas has described the appeal of returning to this format in practical, almost archival terms. He said he misses “a lot of those older songs and how intense they could be with just the two of us,” and added that the pair want to perform stripped-down versions of newer material as well as write new songs altogether to play as a duo. It is a telling move for an artist whose live history has repeatedly shifted between fragility and spectacle, and here the smaller frame seems to be the point.

Perfume Genius will play:

SEPTEMBER
27 – Vancouver, Hollywood Theatre
28 – Seattle, Town Hall Seattle
29 – Portland, Aladdin Theater

OCTOBER
1 – Petaluma, CA, Mystic Theatre
2 – Big Sur, CA, Henry Miller Memorial Library
3 – Los Angeles, Barnsdall Art Theatre
28 – London, Union Chapel

Last year, Perfume Genius released Glory, his most recent album, and spoke to NME about the record’s emotional undercurrent. Looking at the lyrics to ‘It’s A Mirror’, Hadreas said, “I think one of the things that makes me shy in my daily life is that I’m not gonna be taken seriously because I’m little or have a different way of communicating.” He added that even talking to a neighbour could feel “too anxiety-producing,” while performing had become the place where that anxiety no longer held the same power. “I’ve felt a sense of purpose about the job that’s made me work on that,” he said. “I’ve been really serious about [my music] and been rewarded by the fact that people are taking it seriously.”

That tension between private discomfort and public command has long defined the way Hadreas is discussed, and the Duo Tour folds neatly into that history. Earlier this year, he also joined Zara Larsson in urging fans to help improve their Wikipedia photos to something more flattering, complaining that his had not been updated since 2017 and joking that it had been “haunting him for years.” At the end of last year, he also appeared on a cover of Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s ‘I See A Darkness’ with Anna Calvi, another reminder that his work continues to move between collaboration, reinterpretation and revision.