We live in a polarising era for pop. There are those who believe it is a golden age for chart music, which has expanded its horizons to fearlessly tackle the kind of topics once thought unsuitable, from feminism to mental health. Equally, there are those who aver it is a time of unprecedented musical homogeneity and everything in the Top 40 adheres to a more strictly confined set of sounds and tropes than ever before. But whichever interpretation you cleave to, perhaps we can all agree that Troye Sivan’s bid for mainstream superstardom – of the kind where millions of units are shifted, and new releases are announced via giant electronic billboards in Times Square counting down the days – is a unique one. Golden era or nadir, you just don’t get – and indeed never have got – many 23-year-old artists aiming for vast pop success by releasing singles about losing one’s virginity as a bottom and informing the press that their music is influenced by ethereally gothic art rock collective This Mortal Coil, best known for their deathless 1983 cover of Tim Buckley’s Song to the Siren.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The artwork for Bloom.

Troye Sivan: ‘There’s power in living openly while being gay’ Read more

And yet, here we are, staring down Sivan’s second album, Bloom. It was trailed by a string of singles, among them the title track, a straightforward sliver of all-out 2018 chart pop co-authored by Peter Svensson, once best-known as the guitarist in the Cardigans, now more celebrated as the writer of the Weeknd’s Can’t Feel My Face among other hits. In fact, there’s not a huge amount to distinguish it from all the other well-turned singles assembled on the Swedish pop production line until you get to the lyrics, in which Sivan, as one writer put it, “takes the role of what sounds like the receptive partner”: “I’ve been saving this for you baby … promise me you’ll hold my hand if I get scared now, might tell you to take a second baby, slow it down.” Meanwhile, a cynic might suggest that Sivan’s nod to the importance of This Mortal Coil sounds like someone dropping a recherche alt-rock name in search of hip cachet. But no. While Bloom is unquestionably a mainstream pop album, the direct – and one suspects deliberately – cookie-cutter musical approach of its title track is far from the whole story. You can definitely hear the reflection of TMC in the shivering atmosphere of closer Animal, in the album’s preponderance of vapour-trail electronics and cavernous reverb, and in the way The Good Side concludes by lingering for a minute on a muted coda of sparse, spectral ambience.

While that band used these sounds to evoke melancholy 3am introspection, Bloom scatters them around brash pop choruses to conjure up romantic uncertainty or post-coital languor: Seventeen deals with the topic of Sivan taking to the gay dating app Grindr while still a teenager, alternately fascinated and shocked by what he found; the fantastic My My My! is a gleeful exhalation of sexual desire.

The results are characterful. Bloom is done and dusted in 35 crisp minutes – a time at which some pop albums are reaching their mid-point – and feels like a coherent, artist-led album rather than a bet-spreading collection of songs designed to hit every popular musical base. Listening to Animal or What a Heavenly Way to Die, with its distorted electric piano and lyrical lifts from the Smiths, you’re never struck by the feeling of interchangeability that frequently attends pop albums: the sense that the star of the show is somehow surplus to requirements; that however well-written these songs are, pretty much anyone could be singing them.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Troye Sivan: Bloom – video

Gothic ethereality, songs about Grindr, the unexpected appearance of a line from There Is a Light That Never Goes Out: these are not normal occurrences on the kind of album that Bloom aspires to be, at least commercially. You can see why Sivan might think he can do it. Initially a YouTube star, he’s already succeeded in parlaying social media fame into something rather more tangible to those not immersed in the world of vlogs and fancons: not just a career in music, but a parallel one as a Hollywood actor. Whether he can or not remains a moot point. My My My! might sound like a potential No 1 hit, but in the US it stalled outside the Top 30; not even a guest appearance by Ariane Grande could lift subsequent single Dance to This higher than No 64 in the UK. That suggests that Bloom may be doomed to have to make do with mere critical acclaim and applause for its author’s willingness to put his sexuality front and centre. Whether it deserves rather more than that – whether the world of mainstream pop would be a more interesting place with Sivan in its upper echelons than on the sidelines – isn’t a moot point at all.

This week Alexis listened to

Eartha Kitt: Paint Me Black Angels

From the amazing forthcoming archeological compilation State of the Union: America in Crisis 1967-73, an astonishing, forgotten 1970 track by the one-time Catwoman, who sounds bug-eyed with righteous fury.