This year’s charts have been dominated by high-tempo songs – perhaps powered by the intense content-dosing of TikTok, or a generation of young people back up to full speed post-pandemic. Among the finest is Rush, the big summer single by Australian pop star Troye Sivan. Built on a funky house rhythm – like Spiller’s Groovejet turned up to 126bpm – and with a rowdy chorus chanted as if by a troupe of distractingly buff personal trainers, it’s all sweat and heavy breathing; the music video, full of glory holes, hot bodies and lustful looks, underlines the kind of blood-pumping activity Sivan is getting at.
It is a thrill to hear Sivan back to his best – indeed bettering it. Having first found fame as a teen YouTuber, his solid debut album Blue Neighbourhood came out in 2015, balancing bombastic post-dubstep drum programming with poetic production details (like the faraway voices at the back of the mix of power ballad Talk Me Down). Some of that nuance was lost on 2018’s Bloom – despite good lyrics such as the beautiful metaphors for gay sex on the title track, the songs were middling, Sivan’s voice couldn’t carry the belting of would-be big singles like My My My! and he felt increasingly unsuited to heavy drums seemingly designed to leap from the radio.
Five years and one serious breakup later, Sivan’s third album restores that subtlety and leans into his strengths – Something to Give Each Other is a reminder that voices don’t need to be big to be strong. Some of Sivan’s most charismatic singing is essentially conversation, as on One of Your Girls, where he ruefully assesses his chances with a straight man he fancies, or Silly, where he pulls his lofty falsetto back down to earth with a jolt. This is the “wrong” way to sing pop music, but it’s magnetic and sounds wonderful in headphones.
It turns out Rush, the opening track, is a bit of a curveball. There are more high tempos, but where Rush was claustrophobic and orgiastic, other tracks give Sivan more space to move. Got Me Started has a nimble UK garage rhythm; the four-four Honey has the head-rush wonder of looking up at a mirrorball. Silly has a purring deep house backing and producer Ian Kirkpatrick (the man behind Dua Lipa’s New Rules and Don’t Start Now) hides Easter eggs in the mix: the whirr of a rotary phone, the lightest dusting of static on the vocals. This intimacy and detail feels of a part with Finneas’s productions for Billie Eilish and the recent bedroom-pop craze, but even when Sivan’s songs tick along at a high clip, they come with elegance, care, a kind of mindfulness.
For someone who entered post-pandemic life as Melbourne’s most purely eligible bachelor, and having got his breakup songs out the way on 2020’s In a Dream EP, Sivan is clearly surrounded by sex and romance. But he seems to take everything as it comes, luxuriating in the moment rather than fretting about the next; even when singing about a long-distance relationship on the wondrous What’s the Time Where You Are he remains breezy and energised by possibility.
There are a couple of stunning songs, though, where old wounds linger. The drum-free organ ballad Still Got It perfectly conjures the weirdness of seeing someone you were once intimate with (“I saw you at a party / said hello like an old colleague”) and after baldly announcing he wants them back, there’s a coda where his voice is scrambled up in electronics: another poetic production flourish that suggests that you can never truly speak to an old partner as you once did. Subsequent track Can’t Go Back, Baby seems to admit that, and the sampling of alt US songwriter Jessica Pratt, singing that title line over and over like a mantra in Sivan’s head, is beautifully done.
Elsewhere, Sivan’s influences are a little too clear at times: the vocoder chorus on One of Your Girls is very similar to Kavinsky’s Nightcall from the Drive soundtrack, and Got Me Started doesn’t do much new with quite a famous sample (especially in Australia) of Bag Raiders. Some pop fans might also find the stakes a little low overall, and as the pace calms after the opening Rush, not all of them will give Something to Give Each Other the time it needs to unfurl. That would be a shame – this is one of the year’s best and most distinctive pop albums, and it’s to Sivan’s credit that even as the genre speeds up around him, he’s keeping pace while making sure to feel the breeze rush by.
