Troye Sivan really didn’t want to make a break-up album. His heart was broken, sure – and it had “totally turned [his] world upside down”, he tells me over a coffee in a kooky snug in London’s The Ned Hotel, which he describes as a “weird, fancy Wes Anderson jail”. In 2019, he split from his ex Jacob Bixenman and in 2020 returned to Australia, where he stayed for the bulk of the pandemic, getting used to living alone again for the first time in four years. He wasn’t sleeping much. He would wake up crying and pour his emotions into his music when he felt capable of it. In a pandemic haze, he wrote and released a six-song EP, In A Dream, his most melancholic release yet, and he still wasn’t totally sure he had exorcised his demons. “I think, as a songwriter, my goal is to always be guided by honesty,” he says. “And I would have [written a break-up album] had I felt that that was where the songwriting was going.”
But somewhere along the way, something started to shift. Lockdown ended, and he was going out more than he ever had before. In that time, he began forming the kind of fleeting connections that long-term relationships typically shut you off from, “whether it's a one-night stand, or someone that you meet for 10 minutes at a club, or somebody you end up dating for like a couple of weeks.” Through these experiences, he began to feel an intense sense of hope. “I started to get crushes, and realised that I wasn't emotionally dead,” he says. His idea of “real” connections grew and evolved. “I had come from such a serious relationship and didn't place much value on other forms of intimacy. Then, over time, I started to realise that I just love people, and I love community, and sex.” Out of the murky waters of heartbreak, he emerged renewed. And he discovered something about himself: “I really, really love to party.”
This is perhaps not a realisation you’d expect a pop star to make in their late 20s. But Sivan is that very early 2010s type of famous, in that he made his name vlogging about his life on YouTube as a terminally online teen, eventually developing a following of over four million people before his 18th birthday (his coming out video, released in 2013, has over eight million views). By the time he actually wanted to leave his bedroom and explore the real world a bit, he was far too well-known to do a lot of the things normal young people do. Now, though, despite working for much of the last two and a half years – on his upcoming third album and an acting role in The Idol, the most talked-about TV show of the summer – he’s managed to carve out a bit of time to reclaim his youth.
“Rush”, the lead single off of his upcoming third album, is a rowdy banger, and a clear distillation of the fun Sivan is having right now. He wrote it about nights he spent clubbing on Melbourne’s Smith Street. “It's definitely the most dancey, the most unapologetic club [song], [inspired by] all of the experiences that I've had over the last two and a half years,” he says. The song, which features a choral backing track penned by an ex-boyfriend’s ex-boyfriend and a pulsing beat, evokes the communal joy of the dancefloor. “To just be with people,” Sivan says, “and to feel so connected, to be moving as one being and to feel hot and sweaty and sexy and hopeful.” (Its title is also, not for nothing, inspired by the popular poppers brand of the same name).
It’s somewhat of an outlier on the album, he says, in its mindless pop smash simplicity. “This feels like, out of the gate, the way that I want to introduce people to this phase in my life,” he tells me. “To slap people in the face with this in the very beginning – it just felt like a fun way to kind of kick things off after all this time.”
The album is yet to be announced, but is coming soon, Sivan assures me. It is about as far from a break-up record as you can possibly get – a “hopeful, joyous, sexy album.” He recorded it in London, LA, Melbourne and Sweden, with longtime collaborators like Max Martin protégé Oscar Görres and songwriter Leland. The whole thing was sculpted with a future live show in mind, meaning he’ll soon be out on tour for the first time in years. And he’s got big hopes for where that’ll take him. “Leland and I would look at each other – Oscar Görres would play a chord, and we'd look at each other like: ‘Hollywood Bowl.’ Any time we got that feeling like, This is a live moment, we would follow that,” he says.
Earlier, Sivan emerged into the hotel foyer in a cosy knit, looking both preened and a little bit like he’d just awoken from a nap. He’s recently arrived in the UK after fashion weeks in Milan and Paris, where he was pictured with a slew of K-pop stars, Heartstopper Kit Connor and Brian “Logan Roy” Cox.
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A few weeks prior, in May, Sivan attended the premiere of The Idol – Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye’s sleazy melodrama about a pop star’s toxic relationship with a nightclub owner – in Cannes. It was the first time the show would be seen by anyone outside of the production, and anticipation had been tempered by a report published in Rolling Stone about how reshoots and behind-the-scenes changes – which mostly revolved around the ousting of original director Amy Seimetz, with Levinson stepping behind the camera in her stead – had turned the show into “twisted torture porn”. Sivan, who plays singer Jocelyn’s (Lily-Rose Depp) old friend and creative director Xander, was feeling anxious as the date approached, aware of how much scrutiny he and his collaborators would be under. He knew The Idol would reach a very different audience to the “niche” (his words, not mine) but huge crowd his music typically finds. “I was really, really scared that I was going to melt down if it was not received well,” he says. “These are real people to me, people that I've worked with for a year, so I was like, This is gonna be intense scrutiny. Good or bad. I had no idea which way it was gonna go.”
As he sat through the screening, he was relieved to hear the audience laughing at the jokes, suggesting that they’d gotten what Tesfaye and Levinson had been going for. “It was a relief, because I didn't know that people knew that the show had any sense of humour,” he says. They got the prerequisite Cannes standing ovation, too. Once he left the screening, Sivan decided to switch his phone off and leave it off for the duration of his time out there: “I did not read a single thing, and I had the best weekend of my life.”
This was the beginning of his process of separating his experience on the show with the way in which the world has received it. If you have access to an internet connection, you’ve probably seen that The Idol has been well-viewed and vehemently disliked. For weeks, it has been relentlessly pilloried with memes online for its slight character development and slew of awkward sex scenes. While Tesfaye, who stars as rat-tailed lead Tedros, had taken to explaining the show’s murky narratives in interviews and biting back directly at criticism on Twitter, Sivan has made the decision to stay as far away from the noise as possible. “I'm an actor on this show, and I went and did my absolute best,” he says. “And now I want to enjoy the result of that. I'm okay with whatever people want to say about it. It's a TV show. People can hate it, people can love it. I really don't mind.”
Sivan is one of just four actors – along with Tesfaye, Depp and fellow musician Suzanna Son – who made the transfer from the first iteration of the show under the helm of Seimetz, who departed after five months of shooting in April 2022, to the second. “I had a great time both times,” he says.
How did he feel when the Rolling Stone article came out earlier this year? “I think it's tough when that line between real life and public perception... I worry almost more for other people than I do for myself. I don't want anyone to be upset. I was just kind of bummed that people would be bummed.”
Sivan’s experience on The Idol was positive, he tells me, and a massive learning curve. A lot of the show was filmed with unscripted improv, which gave him the kind of training he missed out on by not going to acting school. “It was kind of like an acting bootcamp,” he says. “There were moments like, for example, the music video scene in episode two. That was a 48-minute take at one point, where there would be three cameras, and they would silently reload one and then keep the other two going.”
He’s missed all the memes, so I try and explain one in particular to him: people seem to think that Tesfaye’s pronunciation of “carte blanche” as “cartay blanchay” was unintentional. Sivan, who was in the scene with him, is one of the only people who can set the record straight. Was it in the script? “Yes,” he says. “He was dying laughing about it. Him and Sam [Levinson] – I remember specifically all of us laughing about that, thinking it was really funny.” And yes, he says, he is up for season two if it happens.
Sivan is well equipped to deal with internet swarms. He has been gradually getting used to incremental bumps in his audience over the course of his 14-year career. After making his name on YouTube, he signed a record deal at 18, and his first album, Blue Neighbourhood, released in 2015, was a top 10 hit in the US. But it was 2018’s Bloom, which included Ariana Grande–featuring megahit “Dance to This”, that propelled him to the upper echelon of pop stardom. He’s dealt with his fair share of rabid criticism, too. Take, for example, the time in 2018 when he was seen throwing away some flowers a fan gave him in New York and hundreds on Twitter called for him to be hung, drawn and quartered. (For what it’s worth, Sivan maintains that he threw the flowers out a full two days later as he was leaving the city.) Recently, he posted a thirsty TikTok video of K-Pop star Hyunjin, which set the most dogged set of fans online after him. “I just got crazy, crazy messages for a few days,” he says. “Death threats, homophobic stuff. But, I've been on the internet long enough to know that everything's fine.”
He has experienced actual, worrying-in-real-life stuff that makes online abuse feel like little more than hot air. “I've definitely had my fair share of like stalkers and stuff like that,” he says. “And you know what’s really weird? They’re all way older, not young people. Like, 60s.”
People have taken to showing up at his house every day, bringing him gifts, following him around supermarkets. “You can feel it immediately, the difference between someone who's a supportive listener of your music who just wants to say hi, and someone who's going to show up at your house,” he says.
He knows how to handle the online stuff. He deleted Twitter a few years ago. “That's just not a place that I found to be positive,” he says. “I just really believe in the power of not reading [the negative stuff]. Because then it just may as well not have happened.”
As he’s gotten older, he has become increasingly adept at separating his online and real-life selves. And yet, he’s noticing more and more that across the board, the two are merging. “I've been thinking about this really recently, over the last two months, while I've been promoting The Idol and now promoting the music,” he says. “Something has shifted, where the line between real life and online is super, super blurred. I think it’s because of TikTok. Like, on tour – the banter between songs, even if people were filming it, that used to stay kind of [in the moment]. Whereas now, banter between songs at one particular show can go super viral online.” As has been happening recently at Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, I suggest.
Has he noticed the trend of bizarre fan behaviour at concerts going viral – like when a fan recently threw a phone that hit Bebe Rexha square in the eye, or when someone threw their mother’s dead ashes at a Pink show? He has. “We need better security on stages.”
I wonder if this current phase of really living his life out in the world, shutting out scrutiny where possible, has made Sivan reflect on his upbringing and the impact those hours he spent holed up in his room had on him. “I think it was definitely a positive thing,” he says. “I don't look back and be like, Damn, I wish I was outside more. Because it was really formative.” Rather than shutting him off from the world, the internet opened it up to him. Having grown up in a small Jewish community in Perth, he had no access to other queer people or other musicians. “So for me to have that kind of time to myself, in my room, developing who I am as a person through community online, I think it was really necessary for me. I think I'd be way behind if it wasn't for the internet, as far as like, my personal development goes.”
And, in a music industry completely shaken by the dominance of TikTok, his internet savviness has given him a leg up on a lot of his peers. On there, a 14-second snippet of “Rush”, which he has shared variously with bespoke choreography, selfie videos and knowingly goofy solo dance moves, has already racked up 40+ million views. It’s safe to say, at this point, he’s bending the internet to his will, not the other way around.
Troye Sivan’s new single, “Rush”, is out on Friday 13 July.
