‘Queer artists are held to a really high standard.’ Photograph: Terrence O’Connor “Her voice is kind of timeless – I feel like it could have existed forever.” The track on which Pratt is sampled, Can’t Go Back Baby, is an emotional fulcrum for the record – a bittersweet breakup ballad on which Sivan’s voice weaves around Pratt’s yearning warble. “I always thought that Back Baby was a really special song,” Sivan says. The record feels a little like flicking through a diary chronicling one great summer, down to the sampling of songs that feel as though they were pulled straight from Sivan’s personal playlist, such as Bag Raiders’ Shooting Stars, in Got Me Started and Back Baby, a song by cult Los Angeles singer-songwriter Jessica Pratt. Something to Give Each Other is altogether a more mature, more realised record – not because it contains any ham-fisted concessions to darkness or experimentalism, but because of how much more confident and unburdened Sivan sounds.

His debut album, 2015’s Blue Neighbourhood, peaked at No 7 on the Billboard 200 albums chart his second, 2019’s Bloom, was praised for its smart, sophisticated approach to pop. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morningīorn in South Africa and raised in Perth, Western Australia, Sivan rose to fame in the 2000s and 2010s as a teen YouTuber, and signed to Universal Music in 2013.

I don’t think this album would be what it is without, like, meeting someone at the pool and going on a date, or like, the real life that is so detached from everything else that’s going on in my life.” It’s easy to feel like you’re growing just because you’re busy, but I think sometimes you really grow in the moments in between.” In Melbourne, he says, “I had this time, for the first time in like eight years, to meet people and figure out what else I like to do besides work. “Melbourne is all over this album and all over these experiences.

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