“This album honestly started on fuckin’ Smith Street,” Troye Sivan tells the crowd of his adopted hometown, Melbourne. We’re only a few kilometres south of the queer party hub – and while the grassy, classy Sidney Myer Music Bowl isn’t exactly Sircuit, Sivan certainly brings the same vibes. “We’re gonna turn this place into a fuckin’ club,” he continues. “I’ve partied here – I know how feral you get.”
It’s a homecoming (or “home cumming”, according to one of the T-shirts on sale) for one of Australia’s biggest pop exports. The Perth-raised musician has gone from posting teen YouTube vlogs to sweeping the globe with his electro-pop bangers, working with Charli xcx and Ariana Grande on record, and even being spoofed by Timothée Chalamet on Saturday Night Live. And the night before the concert, he took home three Aria awards, including album of the year for 2023’s Something to Give Each Other.
Sivan and Charli’s co-headlining Sweat tour has been among the year’s biggest pop spectacles, selling out 22 dates across a month-long US run. That, too, has enshrined Sivan into this particular moment in the zeitgeist – an integral part of Charli’s never-ending Brat summer.
His own tour zooms in on the club as the point from which everything else blooms – it’s nostalgic in a way, especially for any millennial who came of age around the ubiquity of Bag Raiders’ Shooting Stars (Sivan’s Got Me Started, which kicks off the show, is built around a sample of the 2009 track).
Flanked by six muscular, barely clothed dancers – most masculine, some androgynous – Sivan is the centre of the pack, moving with sensuality and ease. Sergio Reis’ silky smooth choreography is unabashedly horny – in a moment that has ignited the internet since the tour began in May, Sivan gets on his knees to sing into a microphone, which a dancer is holding at crotch level. At another, the camera zooms into Sivan and one of his dancers furiously locking lips.
The show is a celebration of a specific brand of queerness and club culture – after all, as Sivan admitted, he wrote an entire album about a one-night stand; before encore, he went backstage for a tequila shot. The gender-play in Sivan’s music video for One of Your Girls gets a look in, too, when he emerges in a corset for the number. Audience interaction is at a minimum, though at one point he gives a shoutout to “this twink who knows every single word”; at another, he sarcastically asks, “Are there any gay people here tonight?”
At earlier iterations of this tour in Europe, Sivan showcased his singing on slower numbers such as Could Cry Just Thinkin About You. There’s little of that tonight, as Sivan’s focus is more on intensive and exhaustive choreography, though Rager Teenager provides the customary phone-lights-up moment. Sivan’s real voice slips through the backing track of What’s The Time Where You Are?, and he’s sounding a little pitchy; anyone who came hoping to hear pristine live vocals may have left disappointed, as most tracks are transformed into club remixes.
Sivan’s pop collaborations get airtime, with the notable exception of Grande’s Supernatural, again booted off the setlist since Europe. His Charli tracks, 1999 and a recent remix of Talk Talk, get some of the night’s biggest crowd surges – though it’s a painful reminder of the double-header we’re missing out on in Australia.
But it’s over almost as soon as it begins – with the sticky euphoria of Rush, Sivan is done, exactly an hour after taking the stage. Some punters hang around, hoping for more, while others immediately descend down the hill, slick with other people’s sweat. There’s a feeling of anticlimax when it ends so abruptly. He had just got us started.
Troye Sivan is playing Riverstage in Brisbane on 26 November, and the Sydney Opera House Forecourt on 28 and 29 November.
