Troye Sivan’s Songs of Desire

From a particular vantage, it’s easy to assume that modern life is lonesome, aesthetically horrifying, and extremely uncool: energy drinks, vape pens, virtual reality, twenty-four-hour news, online banking, Bluetooth, airport sandwiches, omnipresent social anxiety. Believing otherwise—engaging in any sort of willful hedonism, or submitting to the notion that pleasure is a serious pursuit and joy is still abundant—has come to feel nearly irresponsible. (Fun? In this economy?) Much has already been made of the phenomenon of young people having less sex, and struggling more with depression; it’s natural, some days, to worry that we have collectively lost touch with a fundamental sense of exuberance.

But then there is the video for “Rush,” the first single from the Australian pop star Troye Sivan’s third LP, “Something to Give Each Other”—it is, as they say, horny on main. A gaggle of exceedingly hot and barely dressed young people are having a good-ass time at a party. The activities range from classic (at one point, a shirtless Sivan is hoisted over a keg of beer) to mysterious (a young man lowers a lit cigarette lighter toward his nether regions while shooting Sivan a come-and-get-it look). Everyone present is physically exquisite, a casting choice that earned Sivan criticism for not better representing the full spectrum of both the queer community and the human body—a fair critique, perhaps, except there is nothing about the “Rush” video that feels tethered to any reality I have ever known. It’s difficult to imagine these people doing anything quotidian or ugly, like breaking down an Amazon box or unloading a dishwasher. The song itself is a slight but propulsive club banger, named for a popular brand of poppers (hits of liquid nitrite, huffed from a small plastic bottle, typically used during sex) and featuring a beefy, Village People-esque chanted chorus (“I feel the rush / Addicted to your touch”). On the verses, Sivan sings in an airy falsetto. “Man, this shit is so much fun,” he coos. “Pocket rocket gun.”

Sivan, who is twenty-eight, was born in South Africa and brought up in Perth, Australia. He began his music career in 2006, appearing on telethons and on the Australian version of “Star Search,” but he first gained broader cultural purchase on YouTube, where, as a teen-ager, he began posting chatty, amiable videos about his life. Even then, his delicate features and genial confessionalism seemed predestined for broadcast. In 2013, when he was eighteen, Sivan released a video titled “Coming Out,” in which he announced that he’s gay. It’s a charming clip—elegant, tender, vulnerable. Sivan seems nervous (he speaks quickly, almost breathlessly) but also self-assured and unafraid. “It will get better for everyone, but I’m also here to say that my message is: it can be good right from the start,” he says. “You can have a completely smooth sail out of the closet.” Early in the video, Sivan explains why he’s going public: “I feel like a lot of you guys are, like, real, genuine friends of mine, and I share everything with the Internet.” Though that sentiment might seem deeply alarming to anyone over the age of thirty, it explains some of Sivan’s savvy as a performer: he understands how to stoke parasocial intimacy with strangers. He has been doing it for more than a decade now. (There was also a bit of business strategy embedded in the choice to come out via YouTube: Sivan was about to sign a record deal with EMI Australia, and hoped to preëmptively thwart any executives who might suggest that he keep his sexuality more private. “I wanted it to be out so that they couldn’t tell me to stay in the closet,” he told The New Yorker in 2019.)

In 2015, Sivan released his début album, “Blue Neighbourhood,” which peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard album chart; it was followed by “Bloom,” in 2018, which hit No. 4. Earlier that year, Sivan performed on “S.N.L.,” and later he talked about the ghastliness of gay conversion therapy on the “Tonight Show.” The success of “Bloom” solidified Sivan’s position as a queer icon (the title is a semi-coy allusion to anal sex), but the album also presented a different version of male hypersexuality: sweet, hungry, tinged with love, never aggressive. “Something to Give Each Other” continues Sivan’s exploration of lust, and how to manage the tension between what our bodies desire and what our little hearts can bear. “I see love in every space / I see sex in every city, every town,” he sings on “Honey.” Sivan’s voice can be feathery, so light it almost evanesces. “I don’t know how I’m gonna tell you what you really mean,” he worries. “I could speak, or just let my body explain.”

The single “Got Me Started” is built around a jaunty sample from “Shooting Stars,” a 2009 song by the Australian electronic-music duo Bag Raiders. The sample features a Stylophone, an analog synthesizer, not much bigger than a paperback book, that was invented in the late nineteen-sixties, and is played by tapping a stylus on a metal keyboard. (David Bowie famously used one on “Space Oddity”; it can also be heard on Kraftwerk’s “Pocket Calculator.”) The sound of the Stylophone is retro and sort of wonky; its presence here feels in conversation, somehow, with a scene in the video in which Sivan leans against a post and confesses his feelings into a dusty landline telephone. (A vague longing for a semi-recent past, in which we were not quite so attached to our devices, seems endemic to a generation that has never known the freedom of being unaware of what everyone else is doing.) The video for “Got Me Started” is less carnal than “Rush” but still visually intoxicating. The sharpness and the charisma of the choreography, by Sergio Reis and Mauro van de Kerkhof, feel indebted to Britney Spears’s “I’m a Slave 4 U,” from 2001, and Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation,” from 1989; it’s been a while since it was this enjoyable to watch people dance. Both videos were directed by Gordon von Steiner, a young filmmaker who has previously shot campaigns for fashion houses such as Dior and Versace. Von Steiner has a keen eye for a particular kind of beauty. His palette is modern, saturated; Sivan and his dancers look gorgeous but a little alien in the greenish, arched, predawn light. Lyrically, Sivan is still grappling with his own appetites. “Boy, can I be honest? / Kinda miss using my body / Fuck it up just like this party did tonight,” he sings.

It’s tempting to describe Sivan’s passions as youthful, and certainly there are aspects of his life that seem exceptionally sensual, but much of what he sings about on “Something to Give Each Other” has to do with the very basic, very universal problem of reconciling want and need. My favorite track on the new album is “How to Stay with You.” It’s got a wiggly, nineteen-seventies feel, with a skronky keyboard line and unexpected bits of saxophone. Sivan’s voice is a little deeper here, with a hint of night-after grit. It is decidedly mid-tempo, though in the context of Sivan’s œuvre it feels almost like a ballad. The lyrics reminded me of the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” a song, from 1966, about wishing, desperately, that the timing of a relationship were better. What happens when you meet someone who seems right in the important ways—“I feel like my brother might like you,” Sivan sings—but the circumstances are vastly misaligned? “I’m a little bit fucked on this,” Sivan sighs. It’s a relatable sentiment for anyone who has tried and failed to align his ambitions. Sivan knows at least one surefire way to soothe his soul: dance it out, while the world keeps burning. ♦