Troye Sivan's Angel Baby is a 'complete fantasy'

After years of shuttling between Australia, where his family lives, and the United States for work, singer-actor Troye Sivan has finally found his happy place.

"I've sort of figured out how I want to split my time between America and Australia a lot better. So I'm a lot less homesick, I don't miss my family as much because I know that I'm going to go see them again soon," the 26-year-old says in a recent online press conference with Asian media.

"I've kind of constructed a better work-life balance. And it's making me really happy."

New single Angel Baby, the first song he has released this year, was written in both Australia and the US. He is known for hits such as Youth (2015) and Dance To This (2018).

While a lot of his previous songs were based on real experiences, the story in Angel Baby was "the ultimate fantasy of finding that person that just makes you want to live in that moment forever and make time slow down".

"Unfortunately for me, Angel Baby's like a complete fantasy, it's not reality," he says. "It was a moment to allow myself to just fantasise and remember how much I love love, and how beautiful it is."

The tune is also a throwback to the pop songs of the 1980s that were always playing at home.

"I grew up with my dad buying concert DVDs and VHS, those are some of my earliest memories of music, and it was a lot of, like, big '80s power bands," he says, citing acts such as American band Toto and English singer Phil Collins.

Angel Baby comes more than a year after his EP, In A Dream. That release included the song Could Cry Just Thinkin About You, a tune that was deeply personal.

"I was having the worst day and I was crying in my kitchen, writing the song. And it just felt like I felt so much better afterwards because I got this thing off my chest," he recalls.

"You can communicate so much with words but then when you start adding in sonics and chords, different sounds, you can communicate an actual feeling rather than just trying to explain to someone how you feel."

Sivan first made his name as a YouTuber and has acted in theatre productions as well as films such as superhero flick X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) and biographical drama Boy Erased (2018).

There are a lot of similarities between acting and music, he says.

"I feel like they sort of work the same muscle, because as a songwriter, your job is to bring up real emotion that you may not be necessarily feeling in that exact moment.

"A lot of the time it's about recalling feelings and communicating them to tell a story, and that's exactly what acting is as well. It's a lot of pulling up stuff from your past or from within you out of empathy for the character that you're playing."

Sivan also spoke about his recent appearance at the Met Gala, where he turned heads by wearing a black dress.

He says: "It sounds silly but it's like clothes, truly to me, are not gendered. I think it was one of those moments when I realised just how true that is because I really felt cool and I felt sexy and I felt so empowered and it was very comfortable."