Early this summer, as Kylie Minogue’s hit club track “Padam Padam” was cementing itself as the song of the summer, the gay pop community felt the Rush. On July 13, Australian singer Troye Sivan released his now-hit single “Rush” — a song whose heavy beat, explicit lyrics about dancing the night away with strangers, and cover art of Sivan’s head thrown back are meant to evoke the ecstasy and intimacy of gay club culture. With a music video featuring a dance sequence destined for TikTok fame, the song instantly became a viral success, making its way to the top of this author’s “On Repeat” Spotify playlist.
On the same day that he hooked the world on the intoxicating beat of “Rush,” Sivan made an even more impressive announcement: The song was to be part of his new album, Something To Give To Each Other, his third full studio album that he released on Oct. 13.
Sivan has been putting out music since 2015, with his older music being known for its more somber tone, which speaks to a queer coming-of-age experience. In his first studio album, Blue Neighborhood, Sivan spends much of the work detesting the suffocating feeling of cookie-cutter suburbia, navigating toxic relationships as a young gay man, and dealing with isolation from himself, his body, and those around him. His second album, Bloom, once coined by Out Magazine as his “sex album,” is much more rhythmic and begins to explore themes of burgeoning adulthood and queer intimacy. Still, there exists a twinge of angst and frustration in his previous work to date. This has carried through into his more recent EPs and solo releases.
Yet Something To Give Each Other feels different. In its unapologetic pop tone and gay club themes, Sivan moves past his pain from growing up queer and revels unapologetically in his sexuality, exploration of self, and sense of uninhibited fun. Simply put, the album seems to say, “I’m young, I’m hot, I’m ready to party.” In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Sivan writes, “This album is my something to give you — a kiss on a dance floor, a date turned into a weekend, a crush, a winter, a summer. Party after party after party after party. Heartbreak, freedom. Community, sisterhood, friendship. All that.” The album is about the adventures, the ups and downs, and the constant roller coaster party of a gay 20-something-year-old.
The album welcomes the listener to the party with hit-single “Rush.” Sivan uses the song’s insatiable beat — background tagline: “I feel the rush, addicted to your touch” — and not-so-subtle nod to VHS cleaner to ask listeners to lean into sensuality, romance, and the tension of dancing the night away with someone new and irresistible. It is this sensation that Sivan calls us to again and again throughout the album. In “Got Me Started,” a second single released on Sept. 20, Sivan fawns over the person he has gone home with for the night, intimately detailing their mutual attraction. It is through these sensual club hits that Sivan pulls the listener in for a good time.
The album, however, is not lacking a nuanced look at the complexity of queer romance. In another pop-beat-heavy song, “What’s the Time Where You Are,” which is my personal favorite on the album, Sivan bares the excitement and anxiety about the uncertain fate of a new relationship. After falling for a lover, Sivan romanticizes the life they could have and wonders what the relationship means, or whether his new flame even feels the same. He is left overanalyzing their connection through seemingly mundane questions. What time is it? How’s the weather? For Sivan’s young gay fan base looking for romantic connection and navigating dating for the first time outside of conventional heterosexual norms, the sense of confusion, masked by a continuous party beat, feels all too familiar.
In the recently famed song, “One of Your Girls,” a slower, more sultry melody, Sivan details an experience of secretly dating a straight-passing, closeted queer person. Sivan falls for a universally loved golden boy who he describes as “pop culture, iconography” and who embodies many straight stereotypes. His lyrics announce, “I’ll be like one of your girls or your homies,” suggesting that he is willing to hide himself behind heteronormative tropes if it means satisfying this man. To drive his point home, Sivan dresses in drag in the song’s music video and gives actor Ross Lynch, a masc-presenting, straight-passing man, a lap dance. The video raises the questions of what is subverting heteronormativity, and what is compulsory heteronormativity.
Throughout the album, Sivan still demonstrates how he has grown, even as he explores the almost teenage frustrations of dating and romance. This comes through during “In My Room,” a song co-written with Guitarricadelafuente that is partially in Spanish. The album’s theme of sexual frustration is in full swing in this song: “Am I fucking 16? This shit’s kinda depressing … I’m alone in my room thinking about you.” Sivan laments over his obsession with a guy, too smitten to even clean up his room. Meanwhile, in both “Silly,” which features an intense lo-fi beat, and “Honey,” with its upbeat tone supported by harmony and guitar, Sivan wonders if he is too messy, too in love to control his feelings or say any of the right things. Even after growing up, Sivan reminds the listener that love and intimacy, particularly queer love which is wrapped up in confusing internalized perceptions of normativity, can make us feel like out-of-control kids again.
While the album is a newer, more pumped-up Troye Sivan, it is not without its power ballads. In “Still Got It,”a somber organ replaces the album’s heavy beat. The pared-down song, through Sivan and a few back-up vocalists’ powerful harmonies, explores the pain and suffocating feeling of a hang up after a break up. “Cut my hair into a bowl after you told me you liked it like that” is a stinging opening line that evokes the visceral feeling of how a past love can still carry immense control over how we perceive and value ourselves — and how holding onto that is easier than letting go. With the lyrics: “getting used to being alone, but babe a house don’t mean a home like before,” listeners are forced to confront a hole left by someone leaving, stripping us of that oh-so-beautiful feeling of being loved and secure. In saying, “I saw you at a party, said hello like an old colleague … was bound to happen, I supposed,” Sivan reminds us of the worst feeling of all: not when a relationship ends, but when it seems like it never happened. When the relationship is gone, is it possible to go on at all? To Sivan, formality is inevitable. In the end, the song is tied together by an admission of his own guilt: “I still got it bad” repeats over and over again. Through such a simple song, Sivan painfully shows us the other side of the album’s coin — the risk and pain of sharing yourself with someone.
By the album’s final song, “How to Stay With You,” a mellow electronic tune that ponders how a relationship may play out, Sivan has taken us step-by-step through a relationship, almost as if we as listeners have been the love interest in question. We have been whisked away to a chance encounter on the dance floor, the irresistibility and inevitability of a night together, the inner anxieties of a potentially blooming partnership, an optimistic vision of what could be, and a painful turn into what may ultimately become. It is a rollercoaster of intimate emotion. Sivan crafts an album so well attuned to the adventure and misadventure of young gay love in a way that Taylor Swift does for a straighter audience. And, by so unapologetically asking us to dance through the ups and the downs, it’s hard to walk away and not feel the rush.
