There are qualities about Mike Hadreas that make him seem heroic: His songbook takes on themes of trauma and addiction, the body and identity, all in a way that seems designed to protect us—a reminder that we're not alone in our otherness. This year, Hadreas has been selling T-shirts depicting an emasculated Eminem, a proper jab at one of popular music's most problematic living artists. On the shirt, Slim is clad in coral lipstick, just a few shades lighter than the tint Hadreas wore on his watershed "Letterman" performance in October, contorting a slow, sultry sway through "Queen". Indeed, Hadreas' work as Perfume Genius has opened a crucial dialogue over the past half decade. Recall the 2012 incident with his 16-second YouTube ad for Put Your Back N 2 It getting censored for "promoting mature sexual themes" because it featured two shirtless men hugging. As there's no shortage of topless folks on YouTube, the message from Google was clear: it was the queerness that was unsuitable and—as the corporation wrote in a statement—"not family safe."

And so, should you need convincing, the quaking "Queen" is empirically necessary. "No family is safe/ When I sashay," Hadreas asserts through expressive breaths on the refrain of the year, channeling personal rage into a surreal energy, addressing gay panic—the idea that one's visible otherness as a gay individual makes people uncomfortable, that it’s perceived as a threat to the straight world. Hadreas sounds just as defiant and poetic in 2014 as Patti Smith did in 1975 telling us how Jesus did not die for her sins. And like Smith's earth-shattering subversions of the female archetype, Hadreas' provocations are confident, uncompromising, epic—he appoints himself "queen" and owns the supposed flaws of his sexuality ("cracked, peeling, riddled with disease") with a deviant wink and demonic smirk. One would expect music that is both radically politicized and universal from someone who grew up listening to "a lot of badass feminist music" and who says he's seen Sleater-Kinney at least 13 times.

His words alone have such inspired power—imagine them publicly broadcast on a marquee in LED lighting, like a Jenny Holzer installation—but "Queen" does not just illuminate the potential of explicit language. It has few aesthetic precedents, though it pushes the borders of pop and avant-gardism in a way Arthur Russell would have appreciated. The cool drag of a drum contribution from PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish morphed the song into what has been aptly described in interviews as "stoner glam." There is a tornado swirling—a deep, booming low-end; abrasive synths rolling into an ecstatic dreamscape; passing clouds made of soul—and Hadreas is at the eye of the storm, a light steadily beaming from the chaos of the world, stepping into the future.

"Queen" is a gay anthem, but it also empathizes broadly with all people who biologically have less direct access to the top seats in society. In a year that rendered the world's rampant, widespread injustice so depressingly apparent, what could keep us believing that all this music stuff matters so much? It's songs like "Queen" and the sea changes they summon that give it purpose. The future of pop belongs to people like Hadreas, who will take us forward to new places we didn't know we needed to go. Surrounded by this loud, extreme music, it sounds like nothing can hurt him now. —Jenn Pelly



Perfume Genius: "Queen"