On his 2015 debut, Blue Neighbourhood, Troye Sivan pitched himself as a dreamy outsider torn from the pages of a YA novel, taking in the world with a wide-eyed gaze that saw far beyond small-town limits. But rather than settling for Lorde imitation or soundtracking John Green adaptations for the rest of his life, Sivan gradually shed his youthful preciousness and adopted a more adult perspective. 2018’s Bloom graduated out of the suburbs and into other peoples’ bedrooms, with anthemic pop songs about bottoming and hooking up with older men for the first time. The music was still booming and melodramatic, but its writing was distinctly more funny and lived-in, dispatches from an artist who’d matched observation to experience by actually fucking around and finding out.
Enter “Rush,” the electrifying, sex-addled lead single to his third album Something to Give Each Other. The song hit like a jolt of poppers and cut through any prior notion of who the singer might be. It immediately reintroduced Sivan as a libertine pop hero, combining hazy, impressionistic lyrics with a breakneck house beat and roaring, homoerotic football chants. Encouraged by his best friend and collaborator, Leland, to “go make a fucking hot video… [and come] out with your dick swinging,” Sivan decamped to Berlin with the filmmaker Gordon von Steiner for a week’s worth of shooting and partying. The final music video is a tableau of lockstep choreography, polymorphous perversity, and nightlife mischief in all of its dank glory. The placid, angel-faced expression that fronted the cover of his debut record had been wiped off and replaced with a lusty pout, with any trace of preciousness long since sweated off on the dancefloor.
Something to Give Each Other was conceived after a break-up during a period of extended singleness. Bloom’s starry-eyed expressions of love are replaced with a much more open conception of romance and sexuality, where intimate connection forms spontaneously. Long-distance yearning bleeds into last-call horniness on “What’s the Time Where You Are?” when Sivan rounds out the chorus by crooning “I’m right on top of this groove/but God, I wish it was you.” On “One of Your Girls” he serenades a straight guy into hooking up, riding a boy-band hook straight out of *NSYNC with a lascivious hot girl wink. And no amount of repeat listens will ever diminish the off-the-charts boldness of the heartfelt plea in “How to Stay with You” to: “Turn my bussy out.”