In A Dream

There’s a tenderness that underlies much of Troye Sivan’s music, even in some of its brightest moments. On *In a Dream*, the crying-on-the-dance-floor feeling he so often excels at is concentrated and strengthened. The EP comes almost exactly two years after the Australian artist’s second album, *Bloom*, and it’s clear that he has not only lived an emotional lifetime since, he’s learned even more about expressing it musically. The singer, songwriter, actor, and former YouTube star’s diary-entry lyrics feel at once relatable, youthful, and profoundly intimate. Wistful opener “Take Yourself Home” finds the singer in a bind, unhappy in his adopted home of LA: “I’m tired of this city, scream if you’re with me/If I’m gonna die, let’s die somewhere pretty.” It’s a sentiment that echoes particularly clearly in 2020, in which Sivan, who grew up in Perth, left America for Melbourne to be closer to his hometown friends and family during the pandemic. Though only 52 seconds long, the lo-fi “could cry just thinkin about you” is a brief but beautiful, woozy ballad that captures Sivan in a moment of heartbreak and loss. And “Rager teenager!” is a sweet, slow-burning retrospective, with Sivan addressing his younger self and reminiscing about his indulgent younger years: “I just wanna go wild, I just wanna fuck shit up and just ride/In your car tonight/In your bed tonight.”

The Australian pop singer finds freedom in the EP format, breaking the family-friendly veneer of past releases and serving up his most idiosyncratic music yet.

Dreamy and diaristic, Troye Sivan unites an atmospheric collection of songs that pour a powerful feeling of gloomy catharsis across the dark-tinged EP.

Contending with a bad breakup and a global pandemic, Los Angeles-based pop singer/songwriter Troye Sivan returned home to Australia.

Rather than significantly alter or challenge the singer’s previous approach, the EP merely embellishes it.