GuardianOct 8Preview
Troye Sivan: She’s the Best review – a strange, singular pop star who deserves to be multiplatinum
(Interscope)Adored by the A-list and filling arenas, but without huge smash hits, the Australian singer treads his own distinctive path through pop via shoegaze, Balearic and the SmithsA few years back, the New York Times reported on the phenomenon of the “middle-class pop star”. The feature bluntly explained that this signified “a pop star who isn’t that popular”, for whom the word signified not commercial dominance, but “a sound, an aesthetic, an attitude”. It isn’t an entirely new phenomenon: you may recall a game late 00s attempt to differentiate critically acclaimed but commercially underground pop artists – Alphabeat, Frankmusik and the Clik Clik among them – from the massed ranks of chart-topping TV talent show graduates by grouping them together under the generic banner of “wonky pop”. But the arrival of social media clearly changed things dramatically, enabling artists who seldo