With a new album next month, the singer-songwriter opens up about accepting life, anticipating grief and grieving when a snake killed his beloved dog

Mike Hadreas feels that he had self-destructive tendencies as young as seven. “I saw a white van with no windows go by,” he says. “And I remember waiting around, hoping that I was going to get kidnapped. I wanted the story. I wanted the intensity of it.”

As he got older, that urge never quite went away. “I would put myself in situations that were dark or demoralising, kind of for research, or to be able to say that I did that crazy thing,” he says. In a Row, a highlight from Glory, Hadreas’s new album as Perfume Genius, makes fun of that impulse, slyly skewering the idea that you have to suffer for your art: “Think of all the poems I’ll get out,” his narrator sings, trapped in the boot of a car.