You can have 15 million Instagram followers and still be someone’s dirty little secret. Or so suggests Troye Sivan on One of Your Girls, a chic, Daft Punk-indebted highlight of his third album, Something to Give Each Other. The song was written about “experiences that I had with guys who had not previously been with guys, and were showing me interest,” he says. It is starry-eyed, sexy and forlorn: “Give me a call if you ever get lonely / I’ll be like one of your girls or your homies,” he sings, his voice shrouded in sad-robot vocoder. Pop stars – they’re just like us!
On a video call from London, Sivan pre-emptively apologises for the garish red light bathing the room he’s in – although it’s a familiar setting for the singer, whose most recent acting project, the maligned Weeknd-Sam Levinson HBO show The Idol, seemed to be lit exclusively in such a hue. “Sometimes those experiences had left me feeling great, sometimes they had left me feeling really sad,” he says of One of Your Girls.
“It probably comes from childhood [feelings] of not feeling like enough, and then seeing these guys that I’m like, ‘I don’t know if I want to be you or be with you, but I’m completely ‘hearteyes’ for you’ … I found that a lot of the time after these experiences, I’d be kind of selling myself short or allowing myself to be the secret. It’s a bit self-deprecating.”
Fun, sad, romantic, conflicted: those feelings seep through Something to Give Each Other like sugar slowly melting at the bottom of a mojito. Led by two singles, Rush and Got Me Started – whose rowdy, racy video clips immediately went semi-viral – it’s a party album inspired by a 2020 breakup and the years that followed. Sivan – by then a global star who had collaborated with Ariana Grande and Charli XCX, and featured in 2018 conversion therapy drama Boy Erased – put down roots in Melbourne, Australia and embraced the thrill of totally new experiences, like those chronicled in One of Your Girls.
“Melbourne is all over this album and all over these experiences. It’s easy to feel like you’re growing just because you’re busy, but I think sometimes you really grow in the moments in between.” In Melbourne, he says, “I had this time, for the first time in like eight years, to meet people and figure out what else I like to do besides work. I don’t think this album would be what it is without, like, meeting someone at the pool and going on a date, or like, the real life that is so detached from everything else that’s going on in my life.”
Born in South Africa and raised in Perth, Western Australia, Sivan rose to fame in the 2000s and 2010s as a teen YouTuber, and signed to Universal Music in 2013. His debut album, 2015’s Blue Neighbourhood, peaked at No 7 on the Billboard 200 albums chart; his second, 2019’s Bloom, was praised for its smart, sophisticated approach to pop. Something to Give Each Other is altogether a more mature, more realised record – not because it contains any ham-fisted concessions to darkness or experimentalism, but because of how much more confident and unburdened Sivan sounds.
The record feels a little like flicking through a diary chronicling one great summer, down to the sampling of songs that feel as though they were pulled straight from Sivan’s personal playlist, such as Bag Raiders’ Shooting Stars, in Got Me Started; and Back Baby, a song by cult Los Angeles singer-songwriter Jessica Pratt. “I always thought that Back Baby was a really special song,” Sivan says. “Her voice is kind of timeless – I feel like it could have existed forever.” The track on which Pratt is sampled, Can’t Go Back Baby, is an emotional fulcrum for the record – a bittersweet breakup ballad on which Sivan’s voice weaves around Pratt’s yearning warble.
It’s a far cry, tonally, from lead single Rush – a minor sensation when it was released earlier this year, thanks in part to its Village People-take-Ibiza sound and in part to its music video, a lascivious Berlin-set clip that sees Sivan dancing in club darkrooms and pouting through a bathroom glory hole. Between Covid lockdowns, Sivan took to the gay clubs of Melbourne’s Smith Street: “I just wanted to go ballistic,” he says. The period of time that inspired Something to Give Each Other wasn’t “a big sob story. I was having so much fun, and I felt like I had sort of met the world again for the first time in a long time.”
Upon release, the Rush video was met with some criticism from fans who felt Sivan wasn’t representing a diversity of body types. “I expect critique all the time – I am on the internet enough to know that people love sharing what they think about things, and I think that’s really cool,” he says. “If everyone hated it, I’m sure that would suck for me, but thankfully it didn’t go like that.”
The critique of Rush may have been justified, but it’s worth noting that few people are dinging Olivia Rodrigo or Blackpink’s Jennie, for example, for only casting thin people in their recent videos. “In general, queer artists are held to a really high standard,” Sivan says. “There are a lot of double standards where people might not come for X person, but they come for Y person about the same thing. I also understand it, because it’s like, ‘OK, coming from a place of persecution, I guess you should know better’, and I get that.”
Something to Give Each Other and its associated visuals are unashamedly horny, in a way that’s relatively new for Sivan. When promoting Bloom, he expressed frustration at the way reporters and fans would “oversexualise” his art, and said he was conscious of not creating any content that could be censored, as so often happens with queer artists. Now, Sivan says: “I just don’t care any more, which is awesome.
“I think a little bit of that is honestly the work of other queer artists in mainstream pop, someone like Lil Nas X – I was just so inspired by how unafraid he was to take up space,” he says. “I was comfortable with existing as gay in pop, but I always felt a little bit like I kind of had to stay in my lane – maybe like, alt-bedroom-sadboy-gay-pop, or whatever.”
Something to Give Each Other – on which Sivan asks a partner to “turn my bussy out” and references a brand of poppers – takes a sharp swerve out of that lane, and is all the better for it. “Throwing all [those hang-ups] away and being like, ‘No, I can make a ruckus like everybody else is and have some fun with this,’ that was really liberating for me,” he says. “I’m just not as afraid as I was before.”
• Troye Sivan’s new album Something to Give Each Other is released on 13 October via Universal
