troye sivan "my my my!" -- 'one of the first great songs of this young year' or overpraised twink mediocrity??

"animal" is a good song but it's a little hard to buy it coming from him

He's better singing about plums and quoting Smiths songs

I am an animal with you

a chinchilla

I still don't understand how "Dance to This" got such a tepid reception

I...like this album a lot.

Dance to This is one of my favourite singles this year and I love its "Pass This On"-rip video too

plot twist

this album is good

the singles really don't stand out as singles to me but w/in the context of the album they work much better... the final 3 songs are pretty killer

not a dud-free album but definitely good! i like "seventeen" a lot and "bloom" is reaching that territory for me where it can plunge me right into bliss or melancholy alike (cf "teenage dream" the song)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LniYWYmNXiM

new single isn't a big pop banger or anything but i really like it

I like it a lot too, works very well in these times, in a (thankfully) roundabout way.

Also, it’s tempting to hear this as “take your cellphone”.

the outro switchup is great

Yeah, it could go on for much longer. I’m almost hearing an amapiano remix in my head.

this song is weird and great

troye sivan "my my my!take yourself home" -- 'one of the first great songs of this young-ish year' or overpraised twink mediocritywhat??

New EP out yesterday, it's pretty good all the way through but I must highlight the follow-up single to the video posted above

"Easy" is so good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCHqIhiFmEY

That's good.

i love this whole EP

that yelp after "this house is on fire", man

wait this is really good. probably more consistent than his album was, perhaps even better overall

it's a decent step up from the album which was solid enough

this is a really good record... last two songs especially

Yup. "STUD" is marvelous.

it's all delightfully slightly-left-of-centre

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn4XQ9WweRY

new remix of "easy" featuring kacey musgraves & mark ronson. it's really good. the EP is still one of my favourite pop releases this year too

^^late entry into my EOY ballot, maybe. I already liked "Easy" but Kacey's voice is just so lovely on this.

Great video, I like the original version of the song more w/o Musgraves/Ronson tho

pretty much my thoughts also

Either I am becoming less resistant to twink mediocrity, or this is really good. I can't claim that it is remarkable in any way, but I find it rather graceful and pretty, and he sounds more invested, as a vocalist, than he's sounded to me on on other songs I've heard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Z6w1D6zs0

It doesn't have much pizzazz but it's pleasant enough. I do admit that Twink mediocrity is one of my things, tho, so I am not the best judge

new single “Rush” is out today. video very NSFW.

i admit that i like this twink more and more— there’s enough Zoomer swagger and earnestness mixed in with the referentiality to older pop and cultural movements to make it palatable to me.

it starts off very promising but the chorus vocals are a very odd choice that completely throws it off

video is very suggestive but doesn't actually cross the line and so avoids being marked 18+ on youtube or anything

I will have to listen on a good system

the chorus vocals are a very odd choice that completely throws it off

After a few more listens, I disagree. I think that the husky male chorus vocals work as a sort of foil to the slickness of Sivan's tenor and falsetto in the rest of the track. Given the track's cultural connotations— poppers, glory holes, orgies, basement raves, etc— it makes perfect sense to have a sort of huskier vocal thing going on in one part of the song. One thing I started to think about was whether the chorus without the verses and bridge would be a dope track, and I concluded yes. Would love to hear remixes tbh, I bet in the right hands it could be something really explosive.

Video is reasonably spicy--lots of jock-strapped bums and (mediocre?) twinks making out--but probably no more so than "Justify My Love" or "Dirrty" or anything like that. For me, that St. Vincent gay orgy video from a few years back nailed this whole vibe more evocatively, but I get why this might be a bigger deal.

I didn't really pay attention to the song.

love this song the more i listen to it

It’s basically a Friendly Fires song through a Joel Corry filter, which I’m not going to pretend I’m above. I think it’s probably best experienced with the video which did wow me although I acknowledge the worthy criticism I’ve seen that notes the obvious bias toward gays of a certain shape.

Shaad inducting “Sircuit” into the Pitchfork lexicon did make me scream.

The more I listen to this song the more I listen to it

random but I like the level 42 'starchild' part

Was trying to describe the appeal of this song/video in a convincing way to my bf and I said “A&W Teen Burger” and he got it

the main thing i get from this video is a visit from the ghost of hangovers past

or an abercrombie ad lol. it's the song to play after 'padam padam' basically.

lol the most annoying expensive-drink homo bar in town just posted a screenshot from the video advertising their friday night

random but I like the level 42 'starchild' part

― xheugy eddy (D-40),

otm

it's funny how many of my gay guy friends whose relationship to pop music stays w/in the gay bubble are asking me about troye sivan now... once you start marketing your music strictly to gay guys it's prob not a good sign for your career as a pop musician

anyway i actually like this song ... the falsetto-y parts in the chorus are nice & are far more present than the chant-y parts

the 'in a dream' EP is really good so i'm looking forward to this album. i think he actually has good taste he's just not that dynamic of a singles artist

"STUD" from that EP is a much better version of "rush" imo ... the perspective is slightly different, but also deeper and more nuanced to me. and of course we don't have to say anything about how the years & years debut album threw the first brick at stonewall as far as "rush" is concerned. fun little song tho

it's funny how many of my gay guy friends whose relationship to pop music stays w/in the gay bubble are asking me about troye sivan now... once you start marketing your music strictly to gay guys it's prob not a good sign for your career as a pop musician

anyway i actually like this song ... the falsetto-y parts in the chorus are nice & are far more present than the chant-y parts

the 'in a dream' EP is really good so i'm looking forward to this album. i think he actually has good taste he's just not that dynamic of a singles artist

It’s interesting, I stand by everything that I typed about Troye upthread, but with “Rush” and hopefully with his subsequent songs/album I feel kind of owned? almost as if everything I previously expressed here was arrived at also by Troye and his team themselves and remedied with this song/video. Both are elevating and undeniably titillating, it feels like less of a commodification of the artist’s body/backstory and more of a celebration of a broader lifestyle/identity.

My enjoyment of Troye’s music has previously been coloured by a kind of camp appreciation but now I just feel bossed around and I love that.

and of course we don't have to say anything about how the years & years debut album threw the first brick at stonewall as far as "rush" is concerned.

Yeah the song feels very post-Y&Y to me, especially "Worship" (albeit that the shift in vocals for the chorus is inverted).

I was discussing with a friend who is into troye what we both thought about the song/video/reception-to-same.

I find the complaints about the video being a missed opportunity to highlight the diversity of "real" gay bodies a bit of a boring take, though not because they're wrong necessarily.

My friend made the point, which I think I agree with, that as titillating as the video is, it does feel pretty stage-managed, a calculated portrayal of the experience of going into a hyper-sexualised queer clubbing (and afters) environment, with little of the residual capacity for surprise and messiness that make those environments tempting to want to portray in the first place (though of course even the "real thing" suffers from this issue, just as each successive hit from a bottle of poppers is marginally less intoxicating).

But of course a carefully curated portrayal of "diverse" bodies would suffer from this problem even more, would feel even less connected to some semblance of real lived experience (by way of counter-example, I quite like the video for Calvin Harris's "Promises", and think it's great that it's centered around a black model with vitiligo, but the clip feels even less "real" to me than the clip for "Rush") - and perhaps made worse by the fact that troye is obviously a twink himself (and is always going to sit at the center of the video).

I wouldn't be surprised if the team behind the video clip discussed this a lot and decided that a video that leaned into blanket-twink-glorification was the lesser of two evils - it does feel like a reasonable stab at capturing the spirit of that scene (which, sure, is pretty body-totalitarian) - albeit that it doesn't really give me Sircuit vibes!

"Rush" is serviceable, I guess, and I'd dance to it, but when he slips into a euphoric mood I don't believe him. He's better at approximating the melancholy of Sufjan Stevens' non-diegetic Call Me By Your Name music.