Troye Sivan teases a new era in leather and a lace thong
Troye Sivan has a new era on the way, and he has announced it in the most Troye Sivan manner imaginable: a social media post in which the Australian pop star wears nothing but a lace thong and a leather trench coat, captioned with a single word, "Soon".
The internet responded as the internet does, with the comments beneath the post splitting neatly between thirst and impatience. Fans have been braced for a fourth studio album for months, and the frustration of being teased rather than fed was summed up by one commenter lamenting that it is always "soon" and never a release date, while another simply demanded the album immediately. Both positions, frankly, are correct.
The evidence has been stacking up for a while. In late June, Sivan posted a carousel from a dance studio, flanked by two dancers, with a video camera emoji and a whispering face in the caption, which in the semiotics of modern pop promotion translates roughly as "the music video is being shot as we speak". He has also made a previously secret Instagram account public, another well-worn move in the pre-album playbook, and the cumulative effect is of an artist methodically loading the cannon before lighting the fuse.
It has been a long wait. Something to Give Each Other, his third album, arrived in October 2023 and gave us Rush and One of Your Girls, the latter accompanied by a video in which Sivan performed in drag and seduced half the planet in the process. That record cemented his position as one of pop's most fluent chroniclers of queer desire, an artist who writes about sex and intimacy between men with a directness that still feels quietly radical on daytime playlists, and who has embraced both his femininity and his standing as one of pop's most celebrated twinks with evident relish.
What makes Sivan interesting, though, is the distance travelled. This is a performer whose career began in childhood and properly ignited when he launched a YouTube channel in 2007, building an audience of millions before the music industry came calling. Blue Neighbourhood, his 2015 debut, gave him his first UK Top 40 single with Youth and announced a songwriter with an unusual gift for rendering suburban queer adolescence in widescreen. A decade on, the awkward YouTube kid has become an artist who can stop the scroll with a trench coat and a single word.
As for what the new era sounds like, nobody outside the camp knows, and Sivan is clearly enjoying keeping it that way. The visual language of the teaser, all leather and lace and calculated exposure, suggests he has no intention of retreating from the confident sensuality of the last record, and if anything is planning to push further. Whenever "soon" actually arrives, the lesson of the past decade is that it will be worth the wait, and that Troye Sivan will look better announcing it than the rest of us look at our own weddings.
