Troye Sivan live in London: A high-voltage fever dream
Inside Apple Music Hall, the tech giant’s spectacular new Battersea venue, the Australian pop star delivers an intimate, brilliantly choreographed performance that is as sensual as it is euphoric.
There’s something exciting about Troye Sivan. More precisely, something electrifying about seeing him in a room of just a few hundred. Battersea Power Station once helped illuminate London; now Apple has turned part of it into a technologically immaculate live music hall. It takes considerable wattage to upstage both a former power station and one of the world’s biggest technology companies. Sivan, evidently, has it to spare.
He appears first as a denim-clad silhouette, sauntering nonchalantly down the back rows. The Hellenic beauty is familiar. A Grecian jawline cutting through Apple’s rounded modernity like a sliver of ancient marble.
“What the fuck is up, London?” he shouts. The answer? You, mate. We’ve been thoroughly infected.
‘Troye Meets World’ kicks things off, and he moves with the slinky confidence of a cat that knows it is being watched, and wants strokes ultimately. Bending low, catching eyes, teasing the front rows, he seems determined to flirt with every person in the building. It’s a masterclass in seduction without ever looking like hard work.
By the time ‘Le Boy’ emerges, the denim jacket has been flung into the crowd and his hands are creeping up his torso. Collective shivers. The sound is astonishing: bass so crisp and physical that it somehow produces calm and exhilaration simultaneously. These frequencies could accompany a deep-meditation session on the Calm app, if they weren’t also the ideal soundtrack to something considerably naughtier.
Apple’s lighting, meanwhile, is an assault on the senses. Full-beam headlights appear to penetrate the corneas; violent flashes give way to reds that seem stolen from the surface of the sun and installed in SW11. Subtle it is not. But this is pop spectacle executed with almost absurd precision.
During ‘One of Your Girls’, one lucky guest is invited up for a private dance. Sivan pauses to check he’s comfortable being touched, reminding him that the performance is being live-streamed and his mum might be watching. The audience is delirious; its envy is practically audible. But there’s something wonderfully awkward about the fan’s predicament: he waits, patiently, being Troye’d with a bit, then is abruptly whisked away. A sudden comedown from pop-star paradise. Around him the room roars “give me a call if you ever get desperate” like a football chant. A crowd-pleaser, certainly, but not the night’s high point.
That comes with ‘Party’. On his newly released album, She’s the Best, Sivan’s dancefloor euphoria carries something more complicated beneath it: longing, self-discovery, a search for connection. The leap from the unbridled liberation of ‘Rush’ to this more reflective era is striking: desire has acquired consequences, and the dancefloor has become somewhere to work through them. Yet Sivan understands something essential about pop. Introspection needn’t come at the expense of exhilaration.
As the choreography takes over, dancers weave through one another in interlocking lines, echoing the song’s extraordinary video. It feels like a crack has opened into another dimension of time and space.
All told, it’s a lavish, high-production-value fever dream, matched by a performer who is word- and pitch-perfect without sacrificing a moment of spontaneity. Apple can engineer the room; it cannot manufacture this kind of presence. Troye Sivan occupying this particular stage is, quite frankly, what the universe designed.