Troye Sivan, the pop star who never softened his queerness for the charts

Troye Sivan

Photo: PURE HONEY / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 5, 1995 Johannesburg, South Africa
Occupation	Singer-songwriter, actor
Known for	X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Boy Erased, Trolls Band Together
Awards	3 ARIA Music

Troye Sivan told his record label he was gay the same way he told everyone else: in a YouTube video. He was a teenager negotiating with EMI Australia, and he did not want his sexuality to be something the label found out about later. The morning after the video went up, an email of congratulations arrived from EMI. Almost everything since has followed that order, with the honest version first and the commercial consequences second. His fourth album, She’s the Best, is his first for a new label, and he has dedicated it to the women, especially trans women, who he says kept him sane.

Troye Sivan Mellet was born in Johannesburg on June 5, 1995, and was two when his parents moved their four children to Perth, Western Australia. He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household and attended Carmel School, a Modern Orthodox day school, before switching to distance education. The stage came early. He sang on the Channel Seven Perth Telethon three years running, once in a duet with the Australian Idol winner Guy Sebastian, and reached the finals of StarSearch. Footage of those telethon performances on YouTube reached a Hollywood agent, and Sivan was cast as the young James Howlett in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. He went on to play the title role in the South African Spud films and, at 14, shared the part of the Boy in a Perth production of Waiting for Godot in which Ian McKellen was also appearing.

Music took longer to go public. Sivan had been posting songs online since he was 12 and began vlogging in 2012; by late 2023 his channel had passed eight million subscribers. EMI Australia signed him in June 2013 and kept the deal quiet for a year. When the TRXYE EP arrived in August 2014, it entered the Billboard 200 at number five, and “Happy Little Pill” reached the top ten in Australia. The Wild EP followed, and then his debut album, Blue Neighbourhood, in December 2015. Its video trilogy told the story of two teenage boys in a secret relationship, and “Youth” became his first top 40 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at 23.

Bloom, in 2018, was where the confidence became the subject. “My My My!” was openly about desire, and NPR noted that “it’s not every day you see a young, skinny, queer kid get to be completely himself in a music video.” He performed it on Saturday Night Live, sang “Dance to This” with Ariana Grande, and joined Charli XCX on “1999”. Bloom reached number four in the US and number three in Australia. The same year he took a supporting role in Boy Erased, the conversion-therapy drama in which Nicole Kidman played the mother of the boy sent away, and co-wrote “Revelation” for its soundtrack, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Song.

The years that followed pulled him toward the dance floor. The In a Dream EP came out in 2020, and “You”, with Regard and Tate McRae, spent eight weeks at number one on Billboard’s Dance/Electronic Songs chart. “Angel Baby” went viral across Southeast Asia. In Three Months he played the lead, a 17-year-old waiting on an HIV test result after a one-night encounter. Then came Something to Give Each Other, released in October 2023, which became his first album to top the ARIA chart. “Rush”, “Got Me Started” and “One of Your Girls” made it his most complete pop record, and “One of Your Girls” became his biggest solo hit in the UK. The album brought three Grammy nominations and, at the 2024 ARIA Music Awards, Album of the Year, Best Pop Release and Best Solo Artist. That autumn he co-headlined the Sweat tour across North America with Charli XCX, and the two recorded a new version of “Talk Talk”.

The record is not spotless. His first regular television role, in HBO’s The Idol, ended when the series was cancelled after a single season. The “Rush” video, admired for how openly it showed queer pleasure, was also criticised for the near-total absence of body diversity among its dancers. Asked about it, Sivan said simply that “it just wasn’t a thought” for him or for his creative director, Gordon von Steiner. That answer sits awkwardly beside his own history. He has a mild form of Marfan syndrome, has spoken about his own body-image struggles, and once told Billboard that “everyone’s body is as beautiful as it is.” In the United States, his biggest successes have been on the dance charts rather than at the top of the Hot 100, and the argument over whether his kind of queer pop can reach a mass audience without dilution remains open.

Outside music he has built a second career that runs alongside the first. Since 2020 he has been an ambassador for Cartier, and he has fronted campaigns for YSL Beauty and Rabanne. With his brother Steele Mellet he founded Tsu Lange Yor, a lifestyle brand of fragrances and objects whose Yiddish name means “to long years”, a phrase from the Jewish household he grew up in. In 2025 the brand reached American stores through Nordstrom.

The new chapter began this summer, after he signed with Interscope Records. The title track of She’s the Best arrived on August 14, produced with Jack Antonoff, George Daniel and Styalz Fuego, and von Steiner’s video cast Nicole Kidman amid images of 1980s queer New York. Sivan has described the song as a love letter to trans women, drag queens and feminine people, and explained it this way: “the only constant in my life keeping me somewhat sane has not been the work, or the men, but the feminine.” The second single, “Party”, followed on September 17. Built around an interpolation of Madonna‘s “Music” and produced with his brother Tyde Levi, it was inspired by the outdoor doofs he went to in Melbourne. Its video, shot at a castle in Gloucestershire, opens with a voiceover by McKellen, whom Sivan asked because of what he calls “queer lineage”, each generation showing the next where to gather.

She’s the Best is released on October 9, 2026, through EMI Music Australia and Interscope. No tour dates have been announced. The album will show whether the singer who refused to soften anything can carry that refusal to a larger audience on a new label.

Selected Discography

Blue Neighbourhood (2015)
Bloom (2018)
Something to Give Each Other (2023)
She’s the Best (2026)

Tags: singers, pop, Nicole Kidman, Charli XCX, Troye Sivan, Blue Neighbourhood

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