Troye Sivan

Troye Sivan Mellet (born 5 June 1995), better known as Troye Sivan, is a South African-born Australian singer, songwriter, actor, and YouTube personality. As an actor, he played the younger version of Hugh Jackman in the 2009 film X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and most recently has starred as the title character in the Spud film trilogy. Sivan also used to regularly make YouTube videos and, as of 2 April 2016, has over 4 million subscribers and over 241 million total views.

Born in Johannesburg, Sivan moved to Australia with his family when he was two. He may have originally obtained visibility in films, but it was YouTube that served as the foundation for his music career.

Dig a little and you can find a babyfaced Sivan singing covers of Justin Bieber and Amy Winehouse. Three years ago, he began to post more regularly. His slick, two-minute talking head vlog is a door into the world of pop and internet culture, sex, fashion and celebrity obsession that make up contemporary teenage life.

One of his more popular videos, Coming Out, from 2013, has clocked more than 6m views. With beguiling simplicity, he tells the story of how he came to take his first nervous shuffles out of the closet (at 14 he confessed to his best friend he “might be” bisexual, which “opened up this thing” in his head, and culminated in telling his parents he was gay several months later). In the video, he says it “feels weird” to have to pronounce his sexuality, “but I feel like a lot of you guys are real, genuine friends of mine and I share everything with the internet”. Here's the 2-part video:

Sivan’s hometown of Perth, a city of 2 million people on the far western coastline of Australia, can feel a world away from the epicentres of Western pop culture. Growing up, he assumed he would one day need to relocate to pursue a music career. “For me, even Sydney seemed so far away,” he says.

But when comments in Italian, Portuguese and Chinese started appearing beneath his YouTube videos, Sivan realised he was reaching some pretty far-flung corners of the planet. His online popularity helped bolster the release of his EPs Trxye (2014) and Wild (2015). Both came in at No 5 on the US Billboard chart and earned the praise of names such as Taylor Swift and Sam Smith. Not bad for a kid who still lives with his parents in the suburbs.

Sivan says the people at his record label A&R saw him play live in late 2015 – despite signing the Pop artist in 2013. “I know that 15, 20 years ago, record labels used to go and see artists play live 30 times before they even thought about signing them,” he says, down the line from Perth. “It’s definitely a sign of the changing times.”

He released music way before that. His debut EP, Dare to Dream, was released in February 2008. That EP included a cover of The Prayer.

... As well as a cover of Over The Rainbow. Here is an earlier version, the live Telethon performance from 2006.

On 15 August 2014, Sivan released his first major-label EP, entitled TRXYE, which peaked at #2 in Canada and New Zealand, and at #5 on the US Top 200. The lead single from the EP, Happy Little Pill, reached #10 in Australia.

The Fault in Our Stars was released on 5 May 2013 as a campaign to help raise money for the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation in Perth, Australia. The song had great success, and Sivan added an updated version of the song to the EP.

On 4 September 2015, Sivan released his second major-label EP, Wild. It was even more successful than his previous one, peaking at #1 in Australia, #3 in New Zealand, #5 in the US, the UK and Ireland, #6 in Canada, and #7 in Denmark.

On 13 October 2015, it was revealed to be an introduction to his debut studio album Blue Neighbourhood, which was released internationally on 4 December 2015. Three songs from Wild were selected to be on the standard edition of the album, while all six songs were transferred to the deluxe edition. Those who had already purchased Wild received a discount to purchase Blue Neighbourhood.

The title song, featuring Alessia Cara, featured a gay themed video:

The intricate, whispery electronica of Blue Neighbourhood draws on Sivan’s love of hip-hop and pop, from Kanye West to Lily Allen. But he has actively resisted the temptation to blindly follow trending sounds, no easy feat for a young artist still growing into his skin. “About a week before we were about to master the album, I was in America and I heard the Weeknd on the radio so many times that I was like, ‘well shit I need to go back and scrap everything and we need to make trap music’,” he says. His management team suggested he “just calm down and wait a little while”. He did, and realised he didn’t need to sound like the Weeknd; he just needed to sound like Troye Sivan.

His glossy trilogy of music videos drenched in indigo tones, also called Blue Neighbourhood, tells the tale of two childhood friends and their budding teenage romance, ultimately torn apart by family dysfunction and repressed sexuality. Sivan says the project came about after watching the 2014 film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the mathematician Alan Turing, who “saved millions of people”, says Sivan, but who was persecuted for his sexuality, with fatal consequences.

“I left the cinema so frustrated and so distraught. I thought so much about all of the lives we’ve already lost and the potential we’ve already lost to LGBTIQ suicide and how much we’re still losing every single day and I just wanted to try doing something about it.”

Much has changed since Turing’s time, he says, noting the marriage equality laws passed in the US recently, but there remains a lot to be done. “I think it’s really narrow-minded to push it to the side and say ‘yup, it’s all sorted’.” Trans children still have “an astronomically higher suicide rate and homelessness rate” compared with the general populace, he says, and in many countries around the world, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer people continue to face threats of physical violence.

The video trilogy is soundtracked by the songs Wild, Fools, and Talk Me Down. Separate videos of each song exist telling parts of the story, but I thought that it would be better to watch the video as a whole. It's like watching a short gay-themed movie, and a good one at that. It's directed by Tim Mattia.

Perth is his “blue neighbourhood”, he says – the evocative and slightly enigmatic title of his debut album. Blue is a nostalgic colour that makes him feel “happy-sad”. He associates the city with warm weather, the beach, his family and friends, and when he’s away touring it triggers a kind of bittersweet emotion. “It’s like you’re looking back on stuff that’s really, really changed and really, really different now. But you’re looking back on it, hopefully, with some real fondness.”

If he were to remain in Perth, he would feel “suffocated”, he adds. “I have a little bit of a complex relationship with home where I’m really, really obsessed with it – it’s my paradise – but at the same time I know that I’m thankful to live the life that I live where I get to go home for two weeks and then leave again before I get sick of it.”

Youth is another big hit off the album, The song comes with yet another good video:

Lost Boy is another good song that appears on Blue Neighbourhood:

For Him. (feat. Allday) is also worth listening to:

Blue Neighbourhood was critically acclaimed by music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 80. Neil Z. Yeung from AllMusic praised Sivan's "sultry and effortless, wounded and breathless" voice as well as noting the album's themes of "heartbreak and affirmation" that make it "a sparkling, triumphant experience".

The album was also a big commercial hit, peaking at #3 in New Zealand, #5 in Taiwan, #6 in Australia, #7 in the US, #9 in the UK Digital chart, #10 in Sweden, #11 in Canada, #17 in Norway, #19 in Denmark, and #20 in Belgium.

“So, the main goal [of the Blue Neighbourhood trilogy video] was to speak about LGBTIQ suicide but then within the video there was a lot of little mini goals, one of them being putting a teenage gay relationship on TV or in music,” Sivan says. “Again, it wasn’t necessarily some big statement I was trying to make. I’m gay and I wrote the songs, so they’re about boys.”

Was he conscious of the history of LGBTQI musicians who have omitted their sexuality from their music? “Growing up, I was super, super aware and conscious of LGBT people and how singers and actors dealt with it,” he says. “I saw a lot of covers of People magazine that said: ‘I’m gay’ and people having full-on photo shoots for it and I was like, ‘OK, that’s going to have to be me one day’, and it just seemed really, really terrifying to me.”

But Sivan’s budding musical and acting career was incubated in the YouTube fishbowl. As a teenager struggling to come to terms with his sexuality, the internet became “such an important resource” and the natural place to declare it. “Then I kind of realised that I’d bypassed that whole awkward ‘oh no, now I’m a singer and I have to come out’ thing – I came into the professional music industry as an out person.

“It’s always been really, really empowering and nice to write whatever I want to write and hopefully it will also inspire some other people.”

I'm quite confident that Troye won't stray from his path while growing up. He's doing things for the right reasons, and is quite aware of what life is, outside the celebrity bubble. He's good looking and talented and has a lot of good years left in him. I can see him eventually picking up the baton from Elton John and George Michael to represent a highly successful and artistically respected gay Pop Star of the early 21st century. I know that this is a bold prediction, but I have faith in this young man. He's not there yet, but he's well on his way.