A few years back, the New York Times reported on the phenomenon of the “middle-class pop star”. The feature bluntly explained that this signified “a pop star who isn’t that popular”, for whom the word signified not commercial dominance, but “a sound, an aesthetic, an attitude”. It isn’t an entirely new phenomenon: you may recall a game late 00s attempt to differentiate critically acclaimed but commercially underground pop artists – Alphabeat, Frankmusik and the Clik Clik among them – from the massed ranks of chart-topping TV talent show graduates by grouping them together under the generic banner of “wonky pop”. But the arrival of social media clearly changed things dramatically, enabling artists who seldom, if ever, encroach on the charts’ upper reaches to develop ferociously loyal – and very online – followings, reliably packed-out shows and a genuine aura of celebrity to go with their good reviews.
Troye Sivan might well be the apotheosis of this phenomenon. Over the last 12 years, his albums have shifted respectable, rather than earth-shattering quantities. Intermittently, the odd single has become a mainstream hit, but their success is vastly outstripped by his profile – arena tours, features in broadsheet newspapers and style magazines, interviews on late night US chatshows – and indeed his standing among huge stars. He has been glowingly written about in Time magazine by Kylie Minogue. Nicole Kidman appears in the video for the title track from She’s the Best. Madonna apparently gave personal approval for him to use a sample from 2000’s Music on another of the album’s singles, Party. He has duetted on hits by Dua Lipa, Ariana Grande and Charli xcx, with whom he co-headlined a US tour just after the release of Brat.
The latter is also present on She’s the Best, providing backing vocals on the title track, one of a brace of songs co-produced by her husband, George Daniel. You might also detect her influence in the track’s lyrics, which offer a BFF’s approving description of a very Brat-sounding girl (stained dress, ciggie on the go, “DJs from Wednesday to Monday / Don’t ask, she’s not taking any fucking requests”) and indeed on the deadpan spoken word vocal and wilful, almost aggressive flimsiness of Party. There’s really nothing to Party beyond the aforementioned Madonna sample, and Sivan blankly intoning a list of locations in which a party might theoretically take place.
But there ends the resemblance. The lyrics of the title track are set to a shuffling breakbeat, and with its misty synths, flute samples and Charli’s cooing backing vocals, it sounds a little like Foxbase Alpha-era Saint Etienne, not the last time that She’s the Best presents the listener with music that might have slipped on to Top of the Pops in 1991, in between Soho’s Hippychick and Zoë’s Sunshine on a Rainy Day.
Both Canada Dry and I Do This for You’s descriptions of a fleeting – and apparently unsatisfactory – online hook-up carry a distinct flavour of the moment the post-acid house Balearic sound intruded on British pop, an intriguing off-message place for a 21st-century artist to alight. Elsewhere, Love So Big It Hurts and Lost Time balance out their straightforward pop smarts with impressively weird arrangements – a layer of abstract noise and bursts of distorted guitar disrupt the former, off-key synths decorate the latter. There’s a beautifully opaque take on acoustic pop on Embarrassingly, with a hint of the Smiths in the mix, substantially prettier than you might expect a song about – and there’s no polite way to put this – having a wank over the thought of your ex-to-be.
These are uniformly great, very hooky songs, filled with lyrics that subtly pine for domestic contentment even as they’re hymning the pleasures of no-strings sex: only the drum’n’bass-influenced Troye Meets World, with its noisome sped-up vocal hook, lands flat. After the album ends you’re left feeling slightly frustrated: there seems no reason whatsoever why Troye Sivan should still be a relative cult figure within pop, rather than an actual multiplatinum star.
But equally, he seems to be using the space he occupies to his advantage, to push and experiment. If he were a huge star, would he be allowed to be as loudly, unapologetically queer as he is here? This is, after all, an album that rhymes “California” with “getting dick just how I wanna”. Would he be more hidebound by expectations that he should come up with more of the same? (There’s an intriguing sense that the more Balearic-facing tracks sound not unlike the album you might have thought Dua Lipa was about to release if you bought the stuff she said in interviews about Radical Optimism being “a pop tribute to UK rave culture” inspired by Screamadelica and Massive Attack.) Would he think twice about counterintuitively burying the choruses of FF and Le Boy under dense waves of shoegazey guitars, however thrilling doing so sounds? Perhaps he’s absolutely fine where he is.
This week Alexis listened to
Michael Kiwanuka – Summer Clothes
The first taste of Fudge, the swiftly recorded Michael Kiwanuka cut he made before suffering a stroke: piano-led soul that’s looser in feel than usual, but no less lovely.
