Troye Sivan is the pop star we need on “Something To Give Each Other”

Graphic by Anya Perel-Arkin

By Bennett Himmel

On his third studio album Something To Give Each Other, Troye Sivan confidently steps into his role as a pop star and sex symbol, infusing classic dance-pop with pure hedonism and occasional post-party depression. Take a moment to think about the caricature of the pop star. Their skin seems to glow, every move they make is perfection. They hit every single mark under the stage light. The music is often a tad shallow, if not incredibly fun. But most of all, the music is sexy, and the person delivering it is even sexier. Nobody in pop music is filling that role right now quite like Troye Sivan.

Troye Sivan has been a prominent figure in the queer community for an incredibly long time. He first stepped into the spotlight as a YouTuber, cozying up to Tyler Oakley and the like. He stood out in a wave of queer vloggers who were making fairly brainless content for introverted teenagers. His appeal was his preciousness – he was very young, queer, and seemed soft, introspective, and gently funny. When he released his first record Blue Neighborhood in 2015, he was met with a wave of young queer fans who saw themselves in the shy, inquisitive lyrics and incredibly adolescent take on love. Troye matured on his second album, 2018’s Bloom, but the result was overly slick and felt slightly anonymous. The songs felt too big for Troye’s pleasant but fairly limited voice, and the songwriting was simultaneously hamfisted and broad. After a five year break, (besides a highly underrated 2020 EP), Troye shed his fairly innocent past on summer smash “Rush,” which functions as the album’s opening track and overall thesis statement: You can reach nirvana if you just give in to the pleasures of hedonism. The song is sweaty, claustrophobic, and easily one of the strangest things he’s ever done. Over a rollicking house beat, Troye sighs a bunch of incredibly unsubtle come-ons, (Trust the simulation, don’t you let it break / Every stimulation, promise I can take) before he brings in an earworm of a homoerotic football chant. The song served as a reintroduction to Troye, stripped of all his fresh-faced innocence. 

The album never quite reaches the energy level of “Rush.”  Despite opening with a party banger, most of the record exists in the later hours of the party, where everyone is sitting with their friends watching the sun come up and the dance floor empty out. Most of these songs are about sex, (the emotional climax of closer “How To Stay With You” is an autotuned wail of “TURN MY BUSSY OUTTTT!”) but there is a staggering amount of heartbroken songs here. On the records melodramatic halfway point “Still Got It,” Sivan pouts “You touched mе in the back seat / of the party bus on Tеnth Street / Kinda confused me / both a couple drinks in too deep / it was bound to happen, I suppose,” sounding crestfallen and resigned, living in the incredibly real feeling that the second time is never the same. On the Jessica-Pratt-sampling standout “Can’t Go Back, Baby,” Troye leads the listener through a tale of heartbreak and unbalanced power dynamics over a dance beat that sounds like it’s coming from inside the club, but you can’t bring yourself to go in.

There are a couple more ragers on here, though. “What’s The Time Where You Are?” somehow makes tropical house work in the year 2023 with the absolutely genius line, “I’m right on top of this groove, but God, I wish it was you.” Later track “Silly,” is indeed silly, and it’s the track where Troye really seems to be having the most fun: listen to the way he drops into a deadpan in the second chorus, almost acknowledging the comedy of saying “I’m so silly like that” in a pop song. And, of course, there’s “One Of Your Girls.” The song is a flirty and subversively sad R&B influenced track, with one hell of a vocoded chorus. It tells a story that is all too familiar for gay men - falling in love with a straight guy who only sees you as a hookup. The song is immediately inseparable from its instantly iconic video wherein Sivan, in drag, gives a lap dance to internet heartthrob Ross Lynch. As the internet’s favorite object of thirst sits on a chair, legs spread and shirtless, Troye whispers into the camera, “Look at you / Pop the culture iconography / It’s standing right in front of me,” revealing a startling level of awareness over how his audience is perceiving the incredibly subversive video.

Something To Give Each Other is easily one of the best mainstream pop records of the year. However, it suffers from many of the issues that plague modern-era radio pop. The record sags in the middle, with a bunch of down-tempo cuts that, while enjoyable, lyrically all stay in the same territory, which leads the 32 minute record to feel much longer than it is. It’s frustrating– Troye is clearly an insanely talented artist with an incredibly interesting frame of reference (the Bag Raiders/2016 meme sample on highlight “Got Me Started”) and sense of taste (seriously, what pop star is sampling Jessica Pratt?!), but he seems content to make sonically slightly basic three minute pop songs. 

Troye could probably be making great avant R&B, but the thing is, the world needs pop stars. The world needs people who make music that makes universal emotions seem like life-or-death, makes every party seem like the last party in the world, and makes sex seem like the world’s best emotional refuge. In a climate where mainstream pop music has become either corporate and soulless or too sad and self-flagellating, it’s incredibly refreshing to see someone so in their element, singing songs about drugs, gay sex, love, and partying. At its core, Something To Give Each Other is an incredibly human album: a record about how fun it can be to feel.