Homosexual is the fifth studio album by Australian singer-songwriter Darren Hayes. It was released on 7 October 2022 and is Hayes' third studio album to be released on his own record label, Powdered Sugar. The album was preceded by five singles: "Let's Try Being in Love", "Do You Remember?", "Poison Blood", "All You Pretty Things" and "Feels Like It's Over". Homosexual is the first of Hayes' studio albums where he has written, composed, produced and performed entirely by himself.
Background
On 26 January 2022, Hayes released a new single, "Let's Try Being in Love". "I wanted to show I love the feminine in me, be proud of the gay me. There's a dance scene that is so passionate, everything's alive and thriving and blooming. That's how I feel in general about music. And that's a hugely sharp contrast to how I felt 10 years ago." On naming the album Homosexual, Hayes told Attitude magazine: "The most obvious [reason] is that I'm a gay man who grew up in an era when that word was used to shame and vilify people like me, so I wanted to reclaim it [...] In 2022 I'm living in a time and in a country where the freedoms of LGBTQI+ people are more at risk than they've ever been.
Hayes told Music Feeds "My new album was born from a desire to rid myself of the grief I developed over the years I lost to shame growing up in a world where being gay was met with rejection and condemnation. I wanted to revisit my teenage years with the wisdom of a proud 50-year-old gay man and revisit my youthful memories and view them through this new peach-tinted lens of joy." He went on to say "The production on my album is deeply inspired by 1985 to 1987, memories of listening to the 12-inch extended mixes of my favourite Madonna or George Michael songs.
Production
In a 2023 interview with The Music, Hayes shared: "I don't play the guitar, but there are guitar solos on this record; how did I do it? I sang and put my voice through a guitar amp and distorted it. These wonderful limitations made me think and be creative within constraints and feel like I was 19 again and trying to just work out how to track my voice or how to make demos [...] When I write music, I see visuals and create worlds. For this album, for example, I created the visual world first. I bought clothing from vintage sellers online from the mid-1980s, I was obsessed with the colour peach, and I had folders of clip art and imagery online that evoked a period in time that looked exactly like the music sounded."
Singles
The lead single from the album was "Let's Try Being in Love", which was released on 27 January 2022. The official music video stars Scott Evans as Hayes' lover. The video was directed by Andrew Putschoegl. In the United Kingdom, "Let's Try Being in Love" debuted and peaked at number 96 on the Official UK Singles Download Chart Top 100 and peaked at number 9 on the Australian Independent chart.
"Do You Remember?" was released as the second single on 11 March 2022. The music video premiered on 17 March 2022 and was directed by Hayes and Madeleine Coghlan.
On 6 June 2022, Hayes released "Poison Blood", which details his life living with depression, and others affected by it. Hayes released the official "Poison Blood" music video on 26 June 2022, announcing UK Tour dates on the same day. The video was directed by Alex Hyner and premiered online on 26 June 2022.
"All You Pretty Things" was released as the fourth single on 19 August 2022 and was the final single before the parent album's release. Hayes dedicated the track to the memory of the victims of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting. The video was released on 30 September 2022 and opened with the message "To those we lost at Pulse".
The official music video for "Feels Like It's Over" premiered on 1 May 2023, directed by Andrew Huebscher.An edited version of the song was released as the fifth single on 12 May 2023.