Blue Neighbourhood
In less than a year, an Australian teenager went from YouTube content creator and fanboy to full-blown pop star with a sold-out debut album tour. Twenty-year-old Troye Sivan is a tall, gangly kid with a voice practically handcrafted for the style of music he’s been producing for the last couple years, and his presence is growing so fast, it’s getting hard to keep up.
He broke onto the music scene with an EP called TRXYE in summer 2014. The five-song collection of emotionally charged music shot Sivan straight into the pop industry. He followed it up earlier this year with WILD, a phenomenal six-song EP that sent his YouTube fans, who’d been awaiting a big-time break like this for years, through a whirlwind of emotions. The small group of tracks garnered so much attention from social media and celebrities that the dream-pop artist had to take a break from YouTube to tour the U.S. and Australia and play to sold-out crowds. He announced both EPs at VidCon, an annual convention for YouTubers.
Just a month after releasing WILD, Sivan announced a follow-up studio album slated for release in early December. Blue Neighbourhood was preceded by a series of videos on Sivan’s YouTube channel teasing viewers with minute or so-long explanations and previews of most of the new songs not featured on WILD. These videos functioned as the visual content for the conceptual album, helping develop the symbolic “blue neighborhood” it focuses on.
The videos focus on the hardships of working out a same-sex relationship in one’s youth and what it was like for Sivan to come out at 14 years old and deal with homophobia in his adolescence. While his parents were immensely accepting of his sexuality, his schoolmates had bullied him out of private school when he was 12.
The album, released Friday, is a representation of where Sivan’s past and present lives converge. As Sivan told Billboard, the album “takes place in both the suburbs of Perth where I’ve grown up, which I consider to be my blue neighborhood, but then also in this fast-paced, crazy, whirlwind life that I’m now living in hotel rooms and planes. … I wanted to make sure that youthfulness was there; I worked mostly with really, really young people on this record.”
The first three tracks of the album, “WILD,” “FOOLS” and “EASE,” all are originally from WILD. They are a fantastic introduction to the album, as it is designed to be a continuation of some of the topics he touched on in the EP. “WILD” introduces the “blue neighborhood” by explaining how desperately he wants to escape its mundane and pressuring atmosphere for a love no one there is willing to understand.
The first new song is “TALK ME DOWN,” which Sivan released as a single weeks before the album dropped. In perfect harmony with his already distinct musical style, the track is a piece that gets you way too in touch with your feelings. Sivan honestly sings this echoing song about desiring physical affection from a male lover, which is incredibly refreshing. As Joy Roden from News Corp Australia puts it, Sivan is “fearless and honest in a way most pop stars aren’t. … Which includes not shying away from pronouns.” This is further exhibited by later album track, “for him.,” an upbeat piece about needing someone, featuring Australian rapper Allday.
The next champion of the album is “YOUTH,” also released as a single before the album dropped. The instrumental of this song is like lace — smooth on the surface but intricate in its layers. When the drums drop against the synthesizer at the end of the chorus, it will be nearly impossible to sit still. Besides, there’s no greater song to dance around like a fool to than a song about being young and wild.
“HEAVEN” is a heartbreaking song about Sivan being gay and not knowing if he’ll ever really be accepted for it. With a harmonizing feature by Betty Who, the song resonates in a chamber-choir style that shakes you emotionally. The chorus is meant to summarize one of Sivan’s greatest struggles of coming out in a Jewish household. As he says in the YouTube snippet previewing the song, he contemplated, “If there is a God, does that God hate me? If there is a heaven, am I ever going to make it to heaven? … If there is a heaven, and I can’t be myself up there, maybe I don’t want heaven.”
The chorus goes, “Without losing a piece of me/ How do I get to heaven?/ Without changing a part of me/ How do I get to heaven?/ All my time is wasted./ Feeling like my heart’s mistaken, oh./ So if I’m losing a piece of me/ Maybe I don’t want heaven?” In his soft voice, these lyrics feel almost as though he’s just thinking out loud in a moment of deep reflection, making them some of the most touching of the album.
The greatest contributor to the album’s concept is “SUBURBIA,” a haunting piece about a basic and boring “blue neighborhood” where nothing new seems to happen, even though there are countless stories sitting inside the homes, the cars and the people. This song and “LOST BOY” are the only two from the album that Sivan wrote completely on his own, making for incredibly raw and honest pieces straight from his heart and soul. “SUBURBIA” is a phenomenal conclusion to the album, offering closure on this “blue neighbourhood” we’ve just walked through alongside Sivan and his angelic voice.
At this point, there is very little that adorably awkward Sivan can do wrong. His debut studio album is a holistic piece of art that creates an atmosphere of disharmony and dissatisfaction like nothing before it. His rapid production is promising for his big fans, as he’s likely to release more music soon. If this guy’s talent wasn’t already undeniable, Blue Neighbourhood is about to change that.
CORRECTION: Due to a reporting error, Troye Sivan was said to have grown up Christian in a previous version of this story. He was raised Jewish. This article has been updated.
