Troye Sivan's 'Bloom' may be the best pop album of 2018

Maeve McDermott | USA TODAY

Troye Sivan didn’t need to make a good album to have a great year. With a role alongside Lucas Hedges in the forthcoming conversion-therapy film “Boy Erased” and a headlining North American theater tour kicking off in September, the 23-year-old Aussie singer has parlayed his early days as a mop-topped YouTube singer into a international fan base, a vocal internet following and a growing 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 actual music he makes, and by the time “Bloom” drops Aug. 31, the actual songs could seem beside the point.

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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 just a few weeks back, “Bloom” rightfully claims that title – a 10-song coming-of-age story of such cinematic scale that it deserves its own accompanying movie.

In both its romantic ups and downs and the euphoric synth-pop that soundtracks them, “Bloom” is reminiscent of Lorde’s 2017 masterwork “Melodrama” – and will likely land on a number of year-end best-of lists – though Sivan spends less time in his feelings than Lorde, and 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," an encounter that wises up Sivan's wide-eyed ingenue of a character without robbing him of his innocence.

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. He's largely the conquest, not the conqueror, of his romantic encounters on "Bloom." There's plenty of the aforementioned 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 in The Smiths' "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out."

When he’s not channeling Lorde’s ’80s synth reverie, Sivan looks to Frank Ocean, another artist heralded as a queer icon, whom Sivan has previously claimed as an influence, as inspiration for the album’s more lovelorn moments. His multitracked vocals on “The Good Side” and yearning interlude on the piano ballad “Postcard” all sound vaguely Ocean-esque.

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 very much 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.