Troye Sivan - Bloom

The Guardian 80

(Polydor)

No other song this year has inspired more unbridled joy than Troye Sivan’s My My My!. Like a pair of glitter-heeled boots, it begs for you to strut as reverbed drums clack and shake in the background. In fact, Bloom, the YouTuber-turned-singer’s second album, is soaked in this exuberance. Whereas before Sivan was meekly stepping out of the closet, embracing his homosexuality with brooding melancholia, Bloom dances around the closet as it burns.

On the title track, Sivan extols the virtues of sex with boys atop watery synths, and the Ariana Grande-assisted Dance to This sees him lean into kinky domesticity, love punctuated by prongs of desire and seductive shuffling beats. Both Animal and Seventeen creep up on you, the latter’s subversive subject matter about teenage sex with older men a pertinent reminder of the dark underbelly of the queer experience. He loses his way on the Sufjan Stevens-lite The Good Side, and What a Heavenly Way to Die is so saccharine that your teeth might rot; the better love songs are Plum and Lucky Strike, with their boppy electro-pop. Nevertheless, Bloom is a bare-faced record, thrillingly honest and defiantly queer, proving Sivan is one of pop’s most essential voices.

Pitchfork 75

The Australian singer’s second album exudes a chic kind of vulnerability. It is a warm and delicate pop album about life as a young gay man.

The Guardian 0

Sivan’s second album targets the mainstream – with songs about Grindr and post-coital languor, wrapped in goth reverb

We live in a polarising era for pop. There are those who believe it is a golden age for chart music, which has expanded its horizons to fearlessly tackle the kind of topics once thought unsuitable, from feminism to mental health. Equally, there are those who aver it is a time of unprecedented musical homogeneity and everything in the Top 40 adheres to a more strictly confined set of sounds and tropes than ever before. But whichever interpretation you cleave to, perhaps we can all agree that Troye Sivan’s bid for mainstream superstardom – of the kind where millions of units are shifted, and new releases are announced via giant electronic billboards in Times Square counting down the days – is a unique one. Golden era or nadir, you just don’t get – and indeed never have got – many 23-year-old artists aiming for vast pop success by releasing singles about losing one’s virginity as a bottom and informing the press that their music is influenced by ethereally gothic art rock collective This Mortal Coil, best known for their deathless 1983 cover of Tim Buckley’s Song to the Siren.

Related: Troye Sivan: ‘There’s power in living openly while being gay’