South African-born Australian muso and YouTuber Troye Sivan has announced his long-awaited debut album Blue Neighbourhood, which is set for release this December.
20-year-old Sivan announced the album during an interview with Zane Lowe, telling the Beats 1 radio host that Blue Neighbourhood is “a proper set of real songs”.
“Some of them are from [latest EP] Wild, some of them are new. It’s going to be a weird experience to play these songs when they’re not even out yet,” Sivan says.
“Wild was always supposed to be like an introduction to this, so everything that I’ve been doing over the last couple of years has been building up to this moment. It’s supposed to just really tell a clear sonic story of who I am.”
The title of Blue Neighbourhood is a reference to the line “let’s leave this blue neighbourhood”, which appears in Sivan’s song Wild and refers to his home city of Perth. The title is also a reference to a trilogy of music videos dubbed the Blue Neighbourhood trilogy, whose final video is for the song Talk Me Down.
In his Beats 1 interview (below), Sivan speaks about growing up in Perth, and why he was keen to leave the city, despite its charms.
“I come from Perth which is a moderately sized city of two million people and from within that I come from a really small Jewish community,” Sivan says.
“I feel like I’ve had this really sheltered, perfect suburban upbringing, and so all of these stories, all of the songs that I’ve written come from that place to me and take place in that context of this blue neighbourhood.
“It’s not necessarily this bad thing but it’s the mundaneness of it, but it’s where your truth is… and just how badly you want to get out, but how nice it is at the same time.”
Blue Neighbourhood is coming in two editions – a standard edition with 10 songs and a deluxe edition with a solid 16 tracks, including all of the six songs featured on Wild. The album will be released on 4th December. Sivan has also shared the cover art for Blue Neighbourhood on Twitter, which can be viewed below.
Sivan was in Australia in September, when he played a quick-fire game of “In A Word” with CraveOnline Australia and also appeared at this year’s YouTube FanFest event. The singer says he’s plotting a world tour, which will include a string of big US dates.
BLUE NEIGHBOURHOOD – PREORDER OCTOBER 15 – OUT DECEMBER 4 pic.twitter.com/ks3zcRfca5
— Troye Sivan (@troyesivan) October 13, 2015
