Troye Sivan, 20, a YouTuber turned singer-songwriter, seems older than his years. On his debut album, youth isn’t so much a party as a maze of tangled emotions wrapped up in spacious, electro-tinged gloom-pop. So songs like the excellent Suburbia and Talk Me Down pick over small-town boredom and a yearning for physical contact respectively, while even the more extrovert Wild and Youth are suffused with cool melancholy. The album’s raison d’être is outlined on the lilting Lost Boy – “I’m just a lost boy, not ready to be found” – but it’s at this point, 11 songs in, you yearn for more variety, a slight shift in mood and pace. But it’s a minor quibble; overall Blue Neighbourhood marks the arrival of a precocious and bold new talent.
