Perfume Genius has premiered the new song “Natural High,” the first music from the project since Mike Hadreas’s 2025 album, Glory. The track, co-produced by Pascal Stevenson of Fashion Club, comes from the score Hadreas wrote for The Lesson, his new live music and dance performance with choreographer Kate Wallich.

The Lesson marks the second major collaboration between Hadreas and Wallich, who previously joined forces on The Sun Still Burns Here. Announcing that earlier show in 2019, Hadreas said: “Dance has become a vital part of my live performances over the last few years.” The new work draws on The Piano Teacher — both Elfriede Jelinek’s novel and Michael Haneke’s film adaptation — as its creative framework.

Wallich described the impulse behind the piece in press materials. “When we started searching for a framework for this new piece, we kept coming back to The Piano Teacher,” she wrote. “We are all drawn to the dynamics between what is good and what is bad...how we’re supposed to behave, and how we aren’t, how to balance desire and restraint.”

Hadreas, for his part, connected the project to his long-standing approach to album-making. “I’ve always thought of my albums as soundtracks to films that do not exist,” he said. “There is a freedom to inhabiting something imagined and purely sonic. I can be every character or not exist at all or body swap at will. Scenes can shift immediately just because I feel like it. That doesn’t change when creating a performance with Kate, all the mystery and thrill of going somewhere lawless and dreamlike stays intact — but I’m not alone in building the world and it literally fleshes out in real time. Body swapping feels very different when you are actually in a room holding the other person.”

The Lesson opens with a work-in-progress showing at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, on February 6. It then runs for five performances at Redcat in Los Angeles from February 18 through February 27, followed by three nights at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York on March 4, 5 and 6.

The European leg begins at the Philharmonie de Paris on March 17 and 18, continues to London’s Barbican Centre on March 21, the Birds of Paradise Festival in Utrecht on March 24, and the National Concert Hall in Dublin on March 27. The tour closes with dates at the National Concert Hall in Minneapolis on April 1 and, finally, The 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle on April 9.

Glory, the album from which “Natural High” breaks, placed at No. 48 in The 50 Best Albums of 2025. With The Lesson, Hadreas extends the recording studio’s imagined worlds into a room with an audience — and, as he puts it, with another body to hold.