I'm not going to lie, I'm a little surprised that we've wound up in this place - or more specifically, how Troye Sivan wound up in this place. I'm sure diehard fans remember this, but he started off in the burgeoning LGBTQ vlogger community on YouTube before transitioning into music, and there was definitely a time where I was convinced that the major label system would eat him alive like it has so many other musicians who originated on this platform we reluctantly call home.
And that didn't quite happen, mostly because Blue Neighbourhood went down among audiences and critics with a respectable amount of success, helped along by working with good producers and cowriters and showing Sivan evolving as a songwriter and performer - he never quite wowed me in that brand of pop, but there was a lot of promise. And yet even then, taking three years between albums did raise some questions for me, especially when his lead-off single was released months ago and didn't seem to pick up a ton of traction, even if it did look like he was going to be getting looser and darker. And some of his new production and writing team did raise questions for me: yes, Ariel Rechtshaid is always a promising addition, but seeing Allie X as a cowriter did raise suspicions, especially as I did not really like her project from last year. That said, he kept the majority of his production team from the last album and somehow even netted a featuring credit from Ariana Grande, and he was smart enough to keep this a brisk ten songs near thirty-five minutes, so I had some hopes this would turn out as strong as Years & Years' sophomore project, which played in the same lane and also dropped earlier this year as a modest improvement. So what did we get from Bloom?