New Music Friday: Troye Sivan’s Blue Neighbourhood

This is one of those start-to-finish albums. You don’t just pick and choose your favorite songs, because it is — most certainly — a living, breathing entity. Maybe not a person-entity. Something in its etherealness is more like a cloud. Which isn’t technically living or breathing, but if you remember correctly, I also called an album living and breathing.

Embrace the heavy-handed metaphor as I say this: You can’t pick apart all the pieces of a cloud. It’s too amorphous and undefined, much the way this album swirls and breathes around synths and strings.

So it’s a peaceful cloud, unperturbed by interaction with birds, or planes, or other things in the sky that aren’t precipitation-related. Only the weather affects this cloud, winds altering its course, its tone.

All this being said, an album isn’t a cloud, actually, and I have a review to write. Let’s look at some songs from Troye Sivan’s Blue Neighborhood.

The eighth track off the album, “Cool,” seems to be a dark fantasy letter written to a person who may or may not be Harry Styles. I’ve got that cigarette smoke/and Saint Laurent coat, but nothing is feeling right/I drink but I choke/I love but I don’t.

So here’s a theory for you: Troye in this song wants, more than anything, to live a life of inauthentic glory. And there’s this guide he knows intimately, or desires to know intimately, who lives such a life already. Of course — typical narrative — Troye becomes disillusioned as the song turns past the first chorus. The gentle thrum of the picked guitar adds to the image of this damp club, nearly empty at 3 a.m. but the smoky haze of the flashing lights are still playing a lullaby for Troye’s guide. Can’t you just see Harry Styles in the middle of the dance floor, swaying to music that stopped hours ago? Another figure standing sullenly in the background, a plastic cup of alcohol-soaked ice in hand, acknowledging that yes — this is fucked up, he’s a ruinous shell — but at the same time, I’m a spark, and you’re a boom.

As we sift through the cloud from “Cool” to “Heaven”, featuring Betty Who, we may be looking at the morning after the dark of the night. It’s given way to a cold, grey morning thrown into the harsh light of reality. Reminiscent of Taylor Swift’s “Clean,” its sobriety makes the muddled desire and longing of “Cool” seem irrelevant. “Heaven” should be sober, and frank — it tells Troye’s coming out story. It’s about authenticity, and belonging, and faith.

Without losing a piece of me/How do I get to heaven? And I’m screaming at me/Trying to keep faith and picture his face/Staring up at me. Knowing at least a part of your authentic self, contrasted with the lack of acceptance surrounding it. You’ve been forced to view yourself as a sin, and how do you even come to terms with that?

As Betty Who adds delicate wisps of air, the song reaches its uplifting conclusion: So if I’m losing a piece of myself/Maybe I don’t want heaven? Troye finally opts for authenticity over embracing a false identity. The stakes are higher, but the stakes shouldn’t exist in the first place. So Troye throws them out of his cloud.

The beauty of all these songs is their simple lyricism floating over technically complex structures. Troye wants you to know what’s happening. He’s a storyteller and won’t deny his audience a straightforward metaphor, so he lets his complications come out in what’s buzzing underneath his words. Sampling from its contemporaries and adding its own stories, Blue Neighbourhood becomes its own shapeless cloud in a sky full of definition.

You can stream Blue Neighborhood on Spotify, or download it on iTunes.

Carson is a 23-year-old who discovered the joys of the Backstreet Boys two years ago, when she fell down a pink fur-lined rabbit hole into the world of pop. She has since taken it upon herself to make an exodus into the underbelly of the glitter-covered beast. You can find her Spotify account here and you can also find her on Tumblr.