Since it was noted by Freud in 1914, psychologists have struggled to understand the phenomenon of repetition compulsion in which a victim is compelled to repeatedly act out past trauma, both tangibly and in the mind.

REPETITION IS THE BEST WAY TO LEARN, proclaims one aphorism in visual artist Jenny Holzer’s Truisms series and perhaps that’s one way to understand the compulsion. By re-enacting an event mentally or physically, the individual flattens an experience into knowledge. An image, instead of the direct experience, now occupies the hollow part of the mind where intellect quietly sleeps.

On his debut record Learning, Perfume Genius, a.k.a. Mike Hadreas, seeks vindication from trauma via spatial, textual, and sonic repetition. The 26-year-old Hadreas recorded Learning in his mother’s house in Everett, WA.  In an interview with The Line of Best Fit, he describes the process of recording the album: “I started off without any intentions really. It was just sort of a compulsion, almost a therapeutic one. It became a daily thing: writing, recording, making videos. I just had this overwhelming feeling that I was doing exactly what I should be for the first time in my life.”

Many reviewers have written that Learning is a devastatingly sad record—and indeed it is.  Perfume Genius shares a similar emotional volatility to their former tour-mates Xiu Xiu.  Hadreas’ sings in hushed tones often accompanied only by his own guitar playing or simple piano chords.  “I [...] always played the piano,” Hadreas has said, “but was really embarrassed of my voice, so I never sang. But a few years ago, after spending a long time alone, I suddenly had something to say and my voice didn’t matter.”

Learning’s songs take place on roundabouts: melodies and tones swirl and recur, as do lyrics. At once, Hadreas’s song lyrics disclose very much and very little, as in the case of the album’s title track, a song built from only five lines of text, leaving mood in the hands of reiteration and rhetoric. “No one will answer your prayers until you take off that dress,” Hadreas sings, perhaps granting new expression to someone else’s disapproval. In the form of a call-and-response, he then addresses the unnamed second person, which may or may not be himself: “You will learn to mind me / you will learn to survive me,” he sings, challenging perhaps both this critic and himself.