UNTAMED TODAY  ·  CULTURE  ·  MUSIC

By UNTAMED TODAY Editorial

He arrived on the internet as a teenager and became, over the next decade, one of the most precisely rendered human beings in popular music. Troye Sivan did not stumble into visibility. He built it, with the particular discipline of someone who understood early that desire is not a liability to manage. It is a direction worth following.

There is a stillness that belongs to people who have finished arguing with themselves. Not the stillness of having nothing left to say. The opposite. The stillness of someone who has learned to trust the weight of what they carry and no longer needs to fill every silence with proof. He is thirty-one, and he has been watched for more than half of that. He is still, quietly, the most interesting thing in the room, not because he performs it but because he stopped.

He came out before the career

He came out publicly at eighteen, on his own YouTube channel, in August 2013, before his music career formally began. The timing was deliberate. He did not want anyone to take it away from him, he later told People, and he wanted to write songs about love that were true and genuine.

He made the choice early, and it cost him things and gave him things, and by every sign he would make it exactly the same way again.

What is easy to miss is that he has had to keep coming out ever since, in smaller ways, to new rooms and industries and to himself. Every record is a version of it. Every time he makes something more honest than the last, there is the same held breath before he lets it go, the same decision to let it land where it lands.

Joy at full volume

Something to Give Each Other, his third studio album, released in October 2023, was more than a record. It was a declaration of terms. Queer joy rendered at full volume, not as resistance, not as reclamation, but as life, the only honest document of what it is to be Troye Sivan, in a body, alive, right now.

The lead single “Rush” made the case physically. He has described the nights that produced it, between Melbourne lockdowns, sober and sweating and grateful to be among people again, and he wanted to write that exact moment. The video became a cultural event, an unapologetic image of desire and belonging that earned him his first Grammy nominations and that felt, to the people who needed it, like a door opening. Not a statement. An invitation. The thing that stays with him, by every account, is the number of people who told him it was the first time they had seen something that looked like their own life.

Explicit and tender at once

His work holds two things most pop music does not bother to reconcile. Explicit desire and genuine tenderness. He is not building a version of himself designed to contain contradiction, which would be a construction project. He is just declining to sort it. You want things and you are soft about them. You are hungry and you are also afraid. On “One of Your Girls” he sits inside the specific ache of loving a straight-passing man who wants him in secret, and in the video he answers it by turning himself into one of the girls, in full drag, a joke and a wound in the same gesture.

The intelligence underneath it is bodily. He came to the idea that the body knows before the mind does through dance, through the way something in the chest decides before a thought has formed. He learned to write from that place rather than toward it.

Style, and power without permission

Clothes were a language he took seriously early, partly because for a gay teenager in Perth, the way you dressed was one of the only forms of expression that was fully yours before you had said anything to anyone. He became fluent out of necessity, and the fashion world he now moves in rewards the same instinct, the real thing elevated rather than a costume version of it.

He also built his audience before the industry existed to receive it. The YouTube following, the early songs, Blue Neighbourhood in 2015, the sharpened confidence of Bloom in 2018, all of it was real before anyone in a building decided it was. The lesson he keeps relearning is that the room does not grant you the thing. You bring it in.

What is loosening now

Something has loosened lately, and it is not the ambition. It is the grip around it. He is no longer writing from the part of himself that needs to be believed. Since Something to Give Each Other he has stretched outward, trading verses with Charli XCX on the Brat remix of “Talk Talk” and co-headlining the Sweat tour, and he talks about wanting to make work that is less about the self and more about the space between people, about what we build for each other when we stop performing and simply arrive.

He wants the body of work to read as someone who kept getting braver. Not louder. Braver. The thing he is still circling, the one he has not found the form for, is something about softness as strength, about the willingness to be affected, to let things cost you something, to stay open when closing would be easier. He knows what it feels like. He has not written the song yet. That, for him, is usually how it starts.

Joy, offered without apology, is among the most radical things a person can produce.

Most people negotiate with themselves in private and hand the world the finished version. Troye Sivan has done it the other way, out loud, in front of everyone, with increasing precision and decreasing apology. What looks like courage from the outside has always been something simpler from the inside. A person who stopped pretending the desire was not there. And made something from it. And kept going.

GOT SOMETHING INSIDE YOU?

A story. A book. A song. A painting. A season of life you finally made it through. A business built from the wreckage. A truth you have been carrying long enough that it is ready to become something. UNTAMED TODAY was built for exactly that, for the voices that do not fit anywhere else and do not apologise for it.

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