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‘See you in two months’: For It-Boy Troye Sivan, a second date is a luxury
From YouTube sensation to actor, pop idol and now, style-setter, Troye Sivan is redefining what it means to be a creative artist today – all through a joyously queer lens.
By Brodie Lancaster
A queue is forming for the chance to smell like Troye Sivan. As the line snakes along Gertrude Street, past the store selling vintage Italian furniture and the one dedicated to classic billiards supplies, Sivan is upstairs fluffing cushions, lighting candles and adjusting a burnt-orange 1950s Ezio Longhi armchair just so. Dotted around the tastefully crumbling walls of this Fitzroy pop-up for Sivan’s homewares brand, Tsu Lange Yor, are pieces of art brought from his home in the nearby inner-Melbourne suburb of Carlton. The vivid blue portrait by Sydney painter Tom Polo that usually hangs in Sivan’s bedroom. A Sydney Ball painting with spears of colour fanning out at all angles.
The savoury scents of burning candles fill the air. There’s the one named for Sassafras, the tiny town in the Dandenong Ranges where Sivan’s parents live in a log cabin. Another invokes a day spent with sweaty backs plastered to the concrete slabs bordering Fitzroy Pool, conjuring memories of a fresh green bowl of gazpacho.
Those in the queue want to sniff the Tsu Lange Yor candles and buy the brand’s fragrances, sold in bottles designed to look like amyl nitrate, a nod to Sivan’s recent hit single, Rush. But they’re also here, let’s be real, for the chance to glimpse Troye Sivan himself – or at the very least, spend a moment in this public-facing simulacrum of the 28-year-old singer’s very famous home and less-accessible inner world.
Sivan’s brother and Tsu Lange Yor co-founder, Steele Mellet, spritzes the pages of my notebook with the three signature scents as he guides me around the pop-up, explaining that the brand’s name comes from a Yiddish phrase meaning “To long years”, which floated through their house as kids. After a bumper launch a week earlier, this sunny August morning marks the pop-up’s final day. An online drop has already sold out, and more product is being pulled from deep storage ahead of the brand’s September debut at the modish and influential Dover Street Market in Paris. Metres-high versions of Sivan’s face are plastered on billboards for Tsu Lange Yor around Melbourne, but visitors rarely catch a glimpse of the man himself unless they’re early enough to spot him at this pop-up, trimming wicks and tending to the space each morning.
Mellet, who is slightly taller and older than his pop-star sibling but with the same sharp-angled jaw and bright, open eyes, has tried to spend as much time here as possible, but even that’s been tricky. “It did get to a point where, if I was in here they’d assume Troye’s nearby,” Mellet says. “It became a bit impractical.”
Sivan with his brother and homewares brand co-founder, Steele Mellet.Credit: Mia Mala McDonald
Born Troye Sivan Mellet to an Orthodox Jewish family in Johannesburg, South Africa, Sivan has inspired fandom for more than a decade. First as a teen content creator on YouTube, then as an actor, sharing the stage with Ian McKellen in a 2010 production of Waiting for Godot and featuring in numerous films, including alongside Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe in Joel Edgerton’s 2018 conversion therapy film Boy Erased. Earlier this year, he was part of the zeitgeisty ensemble cast of one of the year’s most controversial TV shows, HBO’s The Idol, alongside Lily-Rose Depp and singer Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye. The series was plagued with negative publicity for its messy plot and off-screen scandals, but Sivan slipped through the criticism cracks unscathed. He used the frequent filming hiatuses to work on his latest album, Something to Give Each Other, which landed last month to rave reviews and a spot at No. 1 on the ARIA albums chart.
But since opening the doors of his eclectic, uber-stylish Carlton home to Architectural Digest in 2021 (and more than 8.7 million YouTube viewers), he’s been known not just for his musical output but for his taste, his design instincts.
In an industry like pop, one that still can’t shake that ’90s reputation of shady figures crafting stars to tick boxes and achieve mass appeal, Sivan is a wonder. A self-made performer who’s shown the work at every step of his career like a student doing a maths test, he’s succeeded not in spite of but because of his apparent contradictions: a Perth-raised kid grounded in his home in Australia but with global relevance; a fixture on mainstream charts who equally satisfies discerning critics. He manages to be a local of Melbourne, his adopted home, and hold a spot on the Met Gala’s exclusive invite list. If men could be It Girls, he’d be a prime nominee.
These days, whatever he turns his creative attention to – be it a dance anthem, a glimmering silver dreidel, or the placement of a sofa – becomes something of significance, purely because of his involvement. With his new record, Sivan is applying that finely tuned taste to redefining pop. With songs about partying and regret, waking up satiated and going home alone, he’s stripping the genre of its artificiality and decorating it with a personal, human – and authentically gay – bent. And it’s working: in September he snared six ARIA nominations, including best pop release and song of the year, the winners of which will be announced November 15.
Australian perfumer Craig Andrade, who crafted Tsu Lange Yor’s peppery signature scent TLY 5755 (named for the year of Sivan’s birth on the Hebrew calendar; Sivan is a month on the same calendar), recognises in Sivan a new kind of artist, one who defies easy or traditional categorisation. “Here’s someone who is interested in the creative universe beyond singing and acting.”
The signature scent of Sivan’s brand Tsu Lange Yor, which the brothers created with Australian perfumer Craig Andrade’s The Raconteur.
Indeed, beyond songs and candles, the product he offers the globe is a bottled distillation of his world-view, experience, perspective. The teenager beaming down the lens of his webcam gave his fans fragments of his life; now, the 28-year-old hurrying about his homewares pop-up after finishing his Good Weekend photo-shoot, reminding his big brother, “We’ve got to be a shop in 20 minutes!”, is intent on sending the fans waiting in line downstairs a piece of him to carry home with them.
“Throughout all those journeys, it’s felt fluid and easy,” says Will Larnach-Jones, author of 50 Queer Music Icons Who Changed the World. “I think Troye’s managed to eke out a space for himself which is incredibly unique and can speak to many different people at once. It’s nuanced but it’s felt effortless.”
“The Carlton house”, as Sivan refers to the warehouse conversion once owned by modernist architect John Mockridge, is the latest in a long list of places he’s called home. He was two in 1997 when his dad Shaun, who worked in real estate, and former-model mum Laurelle moved the family – Steele, Troye and their sister, Sage – from Johannesburg to Perth. The youngest, Tyde, came along later. He and Sage share Sivan’s musical gene; she sings in a Melbourne band and he’s a solo artist releasing electro-tinged ballads. The Mellets are a close bunch, not blinking an eye at the thought of going into business or living together. (Until recently, both Sage and Tyde lived in the Carlton house: “It essentially just became the family home again,” Sivan says.) Their upper-middle-class home in suburban Perth was always full of friends and on holiday breaks, it wasn’t unusual for a dozen kids to spend their days in the Mellets’ backyard pool. Friday nights were for family and Shabbat dinner.
Steele, who’s two years older than Sivan, knew early on that his brother had a voice. As kids, they’d seen a video of the preternaturally gifted child star Michael Jackson performing the song Ben. “Troye sang it a year later at our primary school talent show,” Mellet says, his eyes lighting up at the memory of being 10 years old, watching his little brother do something that seemed miraculous and inevitable. “I was like, ‘Oh my god …This is the start of that.’ I know it seems weird and crazy, but since that age I’ve always known that he was going to be a famous singer.”
Sivan playing a young Wolverine in 2009’s X-Men Origins.Credit: Alamy
In the following years, Sivan performed wherever he could – at a Perth telethon, in a shopping centre with Guy Sebastian, at synagogues on both coasts. But then puberty came, his voice broke and for a few years his burgeoning YouTube fame took priority. He’d been uploading covers of pop songs, and would build a global audience from performing adolescent pranks, answering fan-submitted questions and collaborating with the era’s biggest online personalities. A talent agent noticed and got him roles in a 2009 X-Men movie playing a young Hugh Jackman, and the title role in the 2010 South African schoolboy comedy Spud (the first in a trilogy) alongside John Cleese.
A poster of Sivan’s narrow, teenaged face with quiffed hair, featuring a saturated filter – the kind that can only be from the 2010s – sits propped against the wall of Mark Holland’s office on the fifth floor of Universal Music Australia’s Sydney premises. Now the managing director of EMI Music Australia – a label under the Universal umbrella – Holland was an A&R (artists and repertoire) manager a decade ago when he first saw a video of “troyesivan18” singing on YouTube. “I was like, ‘Here’s a guy with a really good voice,’ ” he says. “I didn’t know much more.”
Sivan, at age 14, with John Cleese in Spud.Credit: Alamy
Holland emailed Sivan that night, and within two days was landing in Perth to meet his family, intent on signing him before other Australian labels had cottoned on. In the shadow of the debut records by Lana Del Rey and Lorde – pop singers redefining what it meant to be a songwriter, performer and product of the internet – Sivan’s early music dabbled in the well-worn territory of first love, the claustrophobia of youth and experiences that seemed limited by the ceiling of suburbia. He wasn’t there for long.
He landed in Los Angeles in 2013 to make Blue Neighbourhood, his debut record, with American producer and songwriter Brett McLaughlin, who works under the name Leland. McLaughlin spotted a kindred spirit in Sivan. They became fast friends and have since collaborated on more than 30 tracks, including much of this year’s Something to Give Each Other. Despite connecting over “shared queer experiences”, McLaughlin was caught off-guard when, early in their working relationship, an 18-year-old Sivan “nonchalantly put a male pronoun in a [love] song”. “I had one of those trigger moments – this was 10 years ago – of ‘My parents are going to hear this, what are they going to say?’ ” McLaughlin says. “I came out of that and I started to give – to be candid – less f---s. In a really healthy way.”
Long before it became a political football, pronoun use had been tricky territory for gay musicians. Consider George Michael, years before he was outed publicly, finding safety in singing to “you” or about an undefined “baby”. While visibility and representation of queer artists have increased in contemporary pop culture, few have evolved beyond expressing who they are to offer up a taste of who – and what – they want as defiantly as Sivan. Uninterested in neutering his self-expression or sanitising his experiences, he makes music about the queer experience for listeners who get it. And he’s found plenty.
“When I look back [to Blue Neighbourhood], it felt like I was putting it out to my YouTube audience, which felt really safe to me,” Sivan remembers. “And I didn’t realise, at the time, how big it went.”
Sivan with Ariana Grande in New York in 2018.Credit: Getty Images
I ask when he remembers that audience feeling wider, less familiar. “I think when I collaborated with Ariana [Grande]. Or maybe when I performed with Taylor Swift at her show.“
That’ll do it.
Troye Sivan slides across the soft leather corner banquette at Loam, the earth-toned lobby restaurant at Sydney’s Ace Hotel, where we’re meeting for lunch a week after my visit to the Tsu Lange Yor pop-up. Outside, the concrete streets of Surry Hills are baking with heat as dark rain clouds threaten to break. Sivan is only in town for a few more days and has been monitoring the weather in the hope of a visit to the beach before a storm or his impending international flight. With a pat of grown-out, bleached curls shellacked down around his head, he looks just as he did in the video for the thumping single Rush, where he resembles Michelangelo’s David – but stepping off the plinth, pulling on a pair of chaps and going to Berlin to grind against other shirtless boys.
We’re meeting five years to the day since the release of Bloom, the record that featured the Ariana Grande collaboration, Dance to This. After being introduced to the world as a teenager, Sivan used Bloom to capture a moment in his decidedly more grown-up life and relationship. By then, “home” had properly become Los Angeles, where he’d settled down after falling in love with the model Jacob Bixenman. “That was when I officially put down roots and we moved in together and everything. Got a dog.”
Fast-forward a few years: Sivan and Bixenman have broken up. From a bedroom in his parents’ Melbourne rental, deep in lockdown, Sivan released what was essentially his break-up record, the 2020 EP In a Dream. “I went from working constantly to … nothing. And I was single in this new city.” Without a partner for the first time in his adult life, Sivan was “kind of switched-off to people”. The flirty Got Me Started was written soon after the break-up when an interaction with a man at a house party “reawakened” him.
He describes this moment in Sydney to a room of representatives from Spotify, TikTok and his record label. They’ve been hovering around a cheese board, gingerly filling up glasses of wine, when Sivan is shepherded in. Wearing a baggy top from buzzy Australian label Song For The Mute, he takes up little space but all the attention as he positions himself in a small velvet chair. Everyone arranges themselves around him in a cluster of deep leather couches as he starts to talk. Everyone here has either heard Something to Give Each Other or is thrumming with expectation for it, given how omnipresent Rush has been on their platforms since its July release.
One of Your Girls, Sivan tells them, is his favourite song on the album, inspired by the straight guys who slide into his DMs to flirt. In the video, Sivan transforms from pretty-boy Troye into a high-femme drag Britney Spears. He does his best video vixen performance as he dips low, whips his wig and offers Gen Z heartthrob Ross Lynch a lap dance, singing breathily, Give me a call if you ever get lonely / I’ll be like one of your girls or your homies. The lure of straight boys has been kicking around since he was young, but Sivan says “situationships” with them leave him feeling like a shameful secret, so he’s doing his best to resist.
Being in promo mode is “harder than the rest” of the job, Sivan will tell me later. “Something about just talking about yourself all day for months on end, basically can make you feel kind of crazy … You get home at the end of the day and you’ve spent the day trying to give everyone the best version of yourself, which is not always how you feel.” He reaches one hand absentmindedly under the hem of his vintage grey T-shirt to scratch at his chest. On the back of the shirt are the words FOCUS, COMMITMENT, ATTITUDE. Demands, or reminders? Who can say. “Especially with this album, there’s so much genuine joy [in it] … so I want to share that, but it’s hard to feel that way every single day.“
Later, he’ll tell me making Something to Give Each Other unlocked the portal to what comes after the loss of a serious relationship. It was “really when things started to shift from heartbreak to liberation and freedom and confidence and resilience”. After writing about youth when his own was just getting started, then settling down with a serious partner in his early 20s, being single in Melbourne and going to clubs and parties between lockdowns led to Sivan experiencing – and enjoying – a protracted youth only recently. You can’t blame him for going balls-deep in it.
With a tidy slap on a red-raw butt cheek, the Rush video arrived at warp speed. It not only signalled a new era for Sivan, who had gone from pop ballads to explaining the concept of “bush doofs” to American interviewers, but strutted into a worrying cultural moment where a new brand of moral conservatism was digging in its heels. Around the world, harmless events hosted by drag performers were inciting dangerous public protests. The subversive indie director John Cameron Mitchell told The Guardian he’d noticed “a certain sex panic in the air”. Pearl-clutching, you’d be forgiven for thinking, had become trendy.
At the Golden Globes in 2019 with producer and songwriter Brett McLaughlin, with whom Sivan made his debut album at age 18.Credit: Getty Images
The puritanical sentiment caught the attention of Brett McLaughlin, Sivan’s long-time friend and collaborator who co-wrote the thumping, orgiastic song, as he scrolled through comments on the music video. “I see so many people who are saying, ‘That’s too sexual for me,’ ” he says. “And I keep thinking to myself, ‘What happened? When did we all become so fearful of sex and fearful of our bodies, and fearful of what they were made to do, and fearful of the joy that we’re supposed to be experiencing?’ ”
Sivan name-checks Janet Jackson often while discussing the new record. His career aspiration, at this point, is to perform at the Hollywood Bowl, where he and McLaughlin saw her sing and “choreo the house down” in June. In the studio, anything that “felt like something Janet would like or do” was something they chased down.
Queer pop historian Will Larnach-Jones recognises that Sivan is cleverly and intuitively avoiding two traps LGBTQI+ artists are often corralled into: playing into well-trodden, box-ticking tropes for the benefit and comfort of a straight audience, or exploring what Larnach-Jones describes as “How can we piss people off and shock people?” And, he says, Sivan has done it by playing into the “duality of lust, humour and everything in between”.
“Troye has found an ability to articulate a 360 vision in his lyrics and songs about the gay experience, which is far more layered and emotive than anyone’s done in a really, really long time – if at all.”
As Janet Jackson purrs in a track on her 2004 album Damita Jo: “Relax: it’s just sex.”
Titillation for titillation’s sake was a theme of The Idol. Two days before our interview, HBO cancelled the series after just one season. As a member of SAG-AFTRA, the Hollywood actors’ union striking for better conditions, Sivan can’t answer questions about the show but also won’t comment on its cancellation. The previous day, Selena Gomez had come under fire for an Instagram post that was classed as promotion, and it’s got him rattled. “I’m really petrified to talk about [the cancellation]; I don’t want to get a slap on the wrist from anyone,” Sivan says apologetically, then adds: “Also, I of course don’t want to undermine the strike. That’s really what it’s about.”
Sivan with director Sam Levinson, Lily-Rose Depp and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye in Cannes for The Idol.Credit: Getty Images
In the months leading up to its May premiere at Cannes, The Idol was under intense scrutiny after an explosive Rolling Stone investigation in which an unnamed source said the series had gone “from satire to the thing it was satirising”. Sivan’s character, Xander, is the childhood friend-turned-creative director for pop star Jocelyn (played by Lily-Rose Depp). In the show’s unflinching second episode, as Jocelyn spirals during a physically demanding music video shoot, Xander sweeps in to help her walk when her feet, bloodied and raw, can’t hold her up any more.
“I’ve definitely seen people in the music industry get to their breaking point, or be pushed to their breaking point,” Sivan says carefully, sidestepping what he can’t mention. “I’ve seen it a lot, actually. I don’t know if that’s from management or labels or their self-imposed work ethic. Or maybe it’s from [the pressure of] being perceived by so many, but it’s a really common experience that people burn out and break down and sort of sacrifice themselves for the job. And that is real.”
He avoids the same trap by surrounding himself with people who yank him back down to earth. “My house in Melbourne is always full … everyone knows the door code.” He’s currently designing its “California cousin” in Los Angeles with Melbourne interior designers Flack Studio (who won a 2022 Australian Interior Design Award for the Carlton house, and designed the hotel we’re meeting in). He spent the European summer travelling, attending fashion shows where his mum was his plus-one and being the third wheel on the honeymoon of his lifelong best friend from Perth. He’s learnt that the trick to avoiding being another pop star statistic is to “brace and try to fill the human cup up with family and friends and really grounding experiences” before stepping back into “the foo-foo world” of celebrity.
“It’s just not real. It’s really not. Everything revolves around you. Everything is taken care of for you. A lot of other people’s jobs rely on you … and then you’re also being perceived by all these people online who will freely share their opinions of you, or your body, or who you’re dating. And I think that all of that adds up. And if you can’t escape? That’s really scary.
“For me, it’s always important to know that it’s going to come to an end. I think where you really, really can get f---ed up is if you get trapped in it and you believe that that is real life, or you don’t have that safe home base to come back to.”
The troubling series about the troubled pop star with no safe landing was an outlier in Sivan’s acting résumé, which has trafficked in stories designed to send capital-M messages. He put in impressive performances alongside Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn in Three Months, the 2022 comedy about a high school graduate waiting to learn if he’s contracted HIV, and in Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased. “Who knows if I would’ve got cast in those if I wasn’t a singer,” he says, adding that the choice to make films about issues the gay community has come up against is “really about wanting to use my privilege and platform”.
On the day of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, Sivan released the music video for a song called Heaven, from his first album. The black-and-white montage showed historical footage of queer weddings from around the world, almost 12 months before the same-sex marriage plebiscite ushered in Australia’s first legal one, as well as US activist Harvey Milk’s campaign rallies and protests led by ACT UP in the 1980s.
“I just think about HIV/AIDS really often,” he says now, reflecting on the video. “I have this really, really beautiful circle of friends in LA. It’s a lot of gay men. And reading about HIV/AIDS or watching movies about the crisis, it’s like I see my friends in those poor people. And I see myself in them.” His voice catches and he runs his fingers over his eyes, which are starting to fill with tears as he describes the “deep, deep, deep sense of gratitude and sorrow” he feels for them.
“And to the trans women of colour who pulled us up. Maybe this is a terrible comparison to make, but the connection, to me, feels very similar: I feel connected to my queer ancestors in the same way that I feel very connected to my Jewish ancestors who were also persecuted.” His dad lost family in the Holocaust and “really carries it with him”. Sivan and his siblings grew up hearing reminders to “be grateful, be grateful, be grateful … and be proud as well”.
Troye (second from left) with his father Shaun, sister Sage, mother Laurelle, older brother Steele and younger brother Tyde. The family moved from Johannesburg to Perth when Troye was two.Credit: Courtesy of Troye Sivan
While Sivan is no longer religious and hasn’t been “for a really long time” (“I think it sounds nice. I wish I had that ability to release tension to a god, but I unfortunately just don’t”), he imagines his future filled with Friday night Shabbat dinners, and gathering with family and friends to “feel Jewish”.
Sivan seems hyper-aware that his experience – coming out to a very accepting family, connecting with a public that embraced him, having a platform to express the nuances of his romantic life – is far from universal for young gay men. “I don’t think I’ll ever understand everyone’s experience,” he says, kneading his lips with his long fingers as he searches for the right words. “I’ve had it infinitely easier than a lot of [members of the community] have had. I’m aware of that. So if I am going to be put in this position, let me at least try to give the platform to the people telling these stories.”
In an interview promoting In a Dream in 2020, Sivan said he hoped “to f---ing god” his next release would be “a falling-in-love album – or maybe it’s an ‘I’m single and happy and at peace’ album”. I ask where he finds himself on that spectrum. “It’s a combination of the two, it’s just that I’m not falling in love with somebody else. I’m kind of falling in love with everyone and with … life.”
He’s not “on the apps” so much lately – that was “a fun, brief chapter” that mostly just fed the illusion that he was being “active and productive” about meeting someone. Which he wants to do – soon. “When it comes to looking for something more long-term, with my current travel schedule … only recently have I actually admitted to myself it’s impossible. Which is a bummer.“
For all the scaffolding of normality he’s erected around his daily life in Melbourne – the previous weekend was spent binge-watching Harry Potter movies with his brother; his local kebab shop is one of his favourite places to eat – he knows that with a life like his, finding a partner is complicated. “I went on a great date in Melbourne last week and I was like, ‘See you in two months for the second one?’ It doesn’t really work.” That said, now that the album’s out, “I’m willing to make some sacrifices on the work front to be able to go on a second date with someone.”
As we head out of the hotel after our interview, the skies are clear and Sivan is headed to the beach, finally. But downtime is still out of reach – he’s off for a photoshoot. Staying in one place long enough for a second date might be tempting, but for now he’s still in “foo-foo world”. As he hops in the car to plan his return to earth, Sivan leaves behind a cloud of bergamot and cedarwood. It lingers long after he’s gone.
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