Bloom

Troye Sivan’s first album, Blue Neighbourhood (2015), was a record of heartbreak and unrequited love, and by his label’s count it sold the equivalent of more than 2.5 million albums. He then sang on Martin Garrix’s “There for You”, filmed a part in Boy Erased and settled in Los Angeles. Bloom, out on 31 August 2018 through EMI Australia and Capitol, started somewhere happier. He had never written happy music, he told the actor Lucas Hedges for VMAN, so, content in his relationship, he set out to find what a happy version of himself sounded like. The songs became “love letter after love letter” to his boyfriend, home, family, community and nights out.

He made it mostly with the people behind the first record: Leland (the songwriter Brett McLaughlin), Allie X and Bram Inscore, all co-writers on Blue Neighbourhood, and the producer Ariel Rechtshaid. Then, by the label’s account, he went to Sweden to work with Max Martin’s circle. Leland, who co-wrote eight of the ten songs, brought the phrase “My My My!” to a week of sessions in Stockholm, and Oscar Görres produced that song and “Plum”. Oscar Holter produced the title track and “Dance to This”, and Alex Hope, another Blue Neighbourhood collaborator, wrote “Lucky Strike” with Sivan and produced it. Sivan cited This Mortal Coil and the Replacements as 1980s touchstones. On the first album, he told the New Zealand Herald, he had felt pushed to water things down; this time people would get it or they wouldn’t.

The singles ran through 2018: “My My My!” in January, with a video by Grant Singer; “The Good Side”, an acoustic apology to an ex, days later; the title track in May; “Dance to This” in June; “Animal” in August. The title track, written with Leland, Holter and Peter Svensson of the Cardigans, was widely read as a song about bottoming for the first time, a reading Sivan encouraged in a since-deleted tweet. He told Dazed that it was “100 per cent about flowers” and that he wanted to play it at every Pride, and told the Herald that growing up gay he would have valued a song about “sex that people like me have”.

The opener, “Seventeen”, goes further back: Sivan told Attitude that at 17, not knowing where to meet other gay men, he used a fake ID to join Grindr and met older men, and that he looks back on it in neither a positive nor a negative light. Gordi, the Australian songwriter Sophie Payten, co-wrote “Postcard” and sings and plays piano on it; the Irish Times read it as a song about a postcard from Japan his boyfriend never collected. Sivan sat on “Dance to This” for weeks before sending it to his friend Ariana Grande, who returned her part the next day; he said it was about staying in, kissing in the kitchen and cooking dinner. “Animal”, which he called “an ode to the boy I love”, was produced by Rechtshaid with Inscore, Jam City, Buddy Ross, Leland and Bobby Krlic, who records as the Haxan Cloak.

Reviews were warm. NME’s El Hunt and the Independent’s Douglas Greenwood gave it full marks, and the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis praised a coherent record, plainly its singer’s own, done in 35 minutes. The doubts were about sound. Pitchfork’s Jamieson Cox felt the writing ran ahead of music that largely kept to the debut’s team and palette, and Slant’s Sal Cinquemani found it less adventurous than Blue Neighbourhood, if often the better for its plainness. “The Good Side” split them: Cinquemani heard Elliott Smith in it, while the Observer and Rolling Stone thought it reached for Sufjan Stevens and fell short. It charted above the debut in Australia (No. 3 against No. 6), the UK (No. 10 against No. 43) and the US (No. 4 against No. 7).

Bloom says plainly what mainstream pop rarely says at all, and the two songs several critics singled out, “Postcard” and “Animal”, show a writer at full strength. It still sits a step below Blue Neighbourhood: with mostly the same writers, the team traded the glitchier production of songs like “Bite” for clean, accessible pop, as Slant noted, and this is the safer record. The gap is narrow. As second albums by pop singers go, this one is far better than most, and plenty of his peers would trade their own for it. Three records later, its No. 4 remains his best Billboard 200 placing.