Late last year, on the final night of his Bloom tour, Troye Sivan walked onstage suited à la David Byrne and left in the spandexed, eyepatched regalia of David Bowie. Sivan was at the tail end of an album cycle that had him performing alongside supernovas of pop music: strutting down a catwalk singing his hit “My My My!” with Taylor Swift, dancing on tables with Ariana Grande. This costuming was a potent symbol of ambition, and a cheeky nod to subversive, queer-ish forebears. Bloom, Sivan’s 2018 sophomore album, made him an avatar of a new generation of mainstream-friendly queer popstars. In the lights of a sold-out arena, he seemed poised to become the first of them to hit the big—really big—leagues.
In a Dream, the 25-year-old’s six-song sequel to Bloom, isn’t an ascension to blockbusting ubiquity, but something more interesting: a formally adventurous break-up record that explores the far corners of indie pop. Although enjoyable, Bloom and Sivan’s 2015 debut Blue Neighbourhood rarely broke through a certain veneer of cleanliness. When he emerged, there were far fewer young queer people in the mainstream; one could hardly blame him for appearing as a polite and broadly appealing spokesperson for an underrepresented community. At a time when mainstream pop is as calculated as it’s ever been—the product of a major label system obsessed with playlisting and “streamability”—he might have been rewarded for maintaining that family-friendly image. Instead, like the forebears Sivan emulated onstage last year, In a Dream chooses distinctiveness over approachability, offering a bricolage of warped indie rock, tech-house, and theatre-kid emotion.
Across In a Dream, Sivan eschews the black-and-white sadness of typical pop breakup albums in favor of the self-discovery that can happen in the wake of heartbreak. “Stud,” the record’s lascivious, sun-kissed centerpiece, dives into heart-racing casual sex, hinging on a classic trope of queer desire: Do I want to be him, or fuck him? (Call it the Call Me by Your Name conundrum.) “Hey stud! You can come and meet me out front, you got all the muscles and the features I want,” Sivan sings, his Auto-Tuned voice crinkling like tinfoil. He teases and taunts, flirtatious to the point of second-hand embarrassment, as the song switches gear into a raucous house beat. When he’s feeling more downcast on opener and first single “Take Yourself Home,” snatches of arena anthem fodder hang around him like peeling wallpaper. These touches seem to deliberately undermine their own triumphant feeling, serving as bitter reminders that even a great pop song can’t fix the worst feelings. In both cases, the tentative, fresh-faced star of Bloom —“Hold my hand if I get scared now”—is gone.
These songs are drawn from the moments when sadness turns to clarity and loneliness to self-possession, and the same confidence drives In a Dream’s more outré aesthetics. Between Charli XCX’s immersion in PC Music hyperpop and Taylor Swift’s collaborations with members of the National and Bon Iver, there’s nothing new about pop stars drawing from indie music. But In a Dream feels connected to a more peculiar segment of pop’s underground: I hear smacks of Negative Gemini’s dissociated club music and Vegyn’s formed formlessness in these songs, as well as the warmth of Rostam, indie-pop’s current king of the queer bildungsroman. The hazy, guitar-heavy interlude “could cry just thinkin about you” isn’t far from the jangle experiments of avant-garde hero Dean Blunt, who Sivan namechecked on Beats 1 earlier this month. The team that assisted Sivan on In a Dream is largely the same as on Bloom; Sivan seems to have simply grown into his own influences. The EP format—the preferred model for a new class of pop auteurs, from Mallrat to Yaeji—may afford him freedom to explore his own weirdness without the pressure of a major album cycle.
Even the EP’s most conventional song, the ’80s-inspired cheating apology “Easy,” surprises. Sivan sings through thick Auto-Tune, lamenting the dissolution of his relationship, but punctuating it with an uncanny exclamation—“This house is on fire, woo!”—that suggests there’s something sublime about the agony. Nothing about “Easy” should work, from the “woo!” to the Future-lite vocals to the City Pop synth solo. And yet it does. These idiosyncratic choices may sacrifice some of Sivan’s universal appeal, but it’s much more fun to watch him cutting his own path.
Buy: Rough Trade
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