Troye Sivan Goes From Sad Boi to ‘Total Freedom’ in ‘Got Me Started’ Video

Troye Sivan isn’t letting heartbreak stop him from feeling free. On Wednesday, the Australian singer released the Bag Raiders-sampling “Got Me Started,” along with its freedom-seeking, sexy visual.

The Gordon von Steiner-directed video splices clips of Sivan walking through a city and sitting nude at a bathhouse, before engaging in choreography in the middle of rooms and roofs as he’s joined by dancers.

“You just got me started/And I don’t think I can stop it/And I don’t wanna go home alone, all right?” he sings.

The video also shows drag queens getting ready for a show and dancing with Sivan backstage. In other scenes, Sivan answers an old-school phone before flying up the side of a building, and later running through the city streets. The video ends with Sivan dancing in a disco-ball jumpsuit on a helipad.

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“There’s this sort of reprise when the synth comes back at the end in the video when I’m like being pulled up the building and there’s this new drum pattern and to me it it was perfect,” Sivan told Zane Lowe on Apple Music One. “It was the euphoric moment of that total freedom of realizing that you’re completely fine on your own and that also this is not a moment of sadness, but a moment of endless possibilities.”

Sivan spoke to Lowe Wednesday about how he convinced Bag Raiders to let him sample “Shooting Stars.” The track, from their 2011 self-titled LP, had a resurgence on TikTok after being featured in hundreds of users’ videos.

“It was one of the first songs that we wrote for the album and it just stuck around. They [Bag Raiders] were like, ‘By the way, we’ve had hundreds of requests and we’ve never said ‘yeah,’ so don’t fuck this up,’” Sivan said. “And I was like, ‘I promise you, I’m going to make a video. It’s going to be sick.’ Like, I really believe in this.”

Sivan explained that using the track came “naturally” in the studio and never imagined that Bag Raiders would actually allow him to use the stems from the song.

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The track follows “Rush” as the second single for his upcoming album, Something to Give Each Other, which is slated for mid-October. The LP-making process came shortly after getting out of a difficult breakup.

“I had a lot of friends have that conversation with me when I was going through my breakup: ‘Oh, but you know, you’re gonna be OK, and there’s so many people out there…’ It’s hard to hear it at the time, and you know, you kind of doubt it. And then I lived it, and it was this journey that took way longer than I thought it was going to, way longer than it probably should have. But I lived it, and it just felt so mind-blowing to me that they were right. So in a way, I almost want the album to serve as me having that conversation with everyone else as a friend being like, ‘Girl, I promise you.’”