Troye Sivan’s ‘Bloom’ may be the best music we get in 2018. Review,
Troye Sivan didn’t need to make a good album to have a great year. With a role in the forthcoming conversiontherapy film “Boy Erased” and a headlining North American theater tour kicking off in September, the Aussie singer, 23, has parlayed his early days as a moptopped YouTube singer into a international fan base, a vocal internet following and a reputation as one of the young queer artists changing pop music’s relationship with LGBTQ identities.
The lead-up to his sophomore album, “Bloom,” has been a string of similarly triumphant story lines, in which he nabbed Ariana Grande to duet with him on the single “Dance to This” and released the album’s title track, thrilling fans by confirming it alludes to gay sex. Sivan is the kind of artist who can sustain an entire album cycle without mention of the music he makes, and by the time “Bloom” drops Aug. 31, the songs could seem beside the point.
And yet as Sivan so brilliantly proves on “Bloom,” he’s more than just a narrative, and his stories of sexual liberation aren’t just noteworthy because they feature same-sex pronouns. With all respect to Grande, whose “Sweetener” release had some critics naming it the best pop album of 2018, “Bloom” rightfully claims that title – a 10-song coming-ofage story of such cinematic scale that it deserves its own movie.
“Bloom” is reminiscent of Lorde’s 2017 masterwork “Melodrama,” though Sivan spends way more time in bed with the various bodies that populate the songs of “Bloom.” Sivan has mentioned that his current relationship inspired much of the album’s songwriting and that a dalliance with an older man from a dating app inspired the album’s opening track, “Seventeen.”
At its best, the album is breathlessly lustful, as he waltzes through empty kitchens (”Dance to This”) and rolls around in meadows (”Animal”) with his counterparts. There’s plenty of melodrama in the album’s lyrics, as he throws a temper tantrum over an unrequited, Google Translate-assisted letter from Japan on “Postcard“and borrows the title of “What a Heavenly Way to Die” from one of Morrissey’s most famously sentimental lyrics.
When he’s not channeling Lorde’s ’80s synth reverie, Sivan looks to Frank Ocean as inspiration for the album’s more lovelorn moments.
And like Lorde’s “Melodrama” and Ocean’s recent releases, which value imaginative craftsmanship over empty singles aimed at the top of the charts, “Bloom” doesn’t seem likely to spawn any major hits – though it would be a thrill to see a song like “Plum,” a wistful ode to a relationship past its peak that’s also a total earworm, become a hit. That’s much to Sivan’s credit, as he aimed higher than lowest-common-denominator radio pop to make a more thoughtful album that’s also full of bangers. With “Bloom,” Sivan fans can rest easy, knowing their king made a great album. And for the uninitiated, it’s time to start believing all the hype.