On his fourth album, the Australian pop star moves beyond the rush of “Something to Give Each Other,” embracing a more unsettled mix of house, trip-hop, shoegaze and intimate pop.
Troye Sivan’s new album arrives with a familiar problem for a pop star: what do you do after the party?
His 2023 album, Something to Give Each Other, was built around movement and release. “Rush” became one of his most recognizable recent hits, while “One of Your Girls” expanded the album’s exploration of desire, identity and performance. In 2024, Sivan took that world on the road with Charli XCX for their co-headlining SWEAT Tour.
She’s the Best, released on October 9 through Tokky’s Music under exclusive license to Interscope Records, starts somewhere different. The clubs are still there, as are sex, desire and the pull of the dance floor. But the album is equally interested in what happens when the music stops and the exhilaration of being out in the world gives way to solitude.
Across its 12 tracks, Sivan moves between dance music, trip-hop, softer pop arrangements and more atmospheric, alternative-leaning sounds. The result is less immediately streamlined than Something to Give Each Other, but it gives him more room to let a song drift, change direction or resist an obvious payoff.
That shift is apparent from the opening title track.
“She’s the Best” is not a conventional dance-pop introduction. Sivan speaks and sings over a hazy arrangement, keeping his own performance relatively understated as the track builds around him. Charli XCX contributes vocals to its closing chant, while the accompanying video features Nicole Kidman. Together, the song and video establish the album’s interest in the women and feminine figures who have shaped Sivan’s life, as well as the forms of intimacy that exist beyond romantic relationships.
Then comes “Canada Dry,” followed by “Party,” one of the album’s clearest links to the world of Something to Give Each Other.
Built around an interpolation of Madonna’s 2000 single “Music,” “Party” draws on a familiar piece of dance-pop history without simply recreating it. Its appeal lies in the atmosphere as much as the hook: the track captures the rush of a night out while fitting into an album that is increasingly concerned with what that rush can and cannot provide.
That distinction matters. She’s the Best does not attempt to repeat the formula that made its predecessor so effective. Instead, it asks what comes after the moment when everything seems to be happening at once.
The comedown is the point
The album’s most interesting quality is the tension between its sensual production and its recurring sense of longing.
In interviews around the release, Sivan has described the emotional contrast that emerged from touring with Charli XCX. The SWEAT Tour was an intense, communal experience, but the exhilaration of performing did not necessarily translate into the same feeling once he returned home. Apple Music’s accompanying album interview traces She’s the Best to that mixture of connection and loneliness.
That context helps explain why so much of the album is concerned with relationships that remain hypothetical, incomplete or difficult to sustain.
“FF” imagines a future relationship with a man Sivan has not yet met. Rather than recounting an established romance, it turns anticipation into the subject itself. The desire is directed toward someone who may exist somewhere beyond the edges of the singer’s present life.
“I Do This For You” and “Canada Dry” approach intimacy from different angles, placing fleeting encounters and desire within the album’s broader after-hours atmosphere. These songs retain the sensuality associated with Sivan’s recent work, but the record does not treat physical connection as a complete answer to loneliness.
The question running through She’s the Best is not whether the party is good. It is whether the feeling it creates can last.
Sivan rarely answers that question with a dramatic change in musical direction. Instead, he allows the album to move between different emotional temperatures.
“Embarrassingly” turns toward a more exposed, intimate register, while “Love So Big It Hurts” brings a more expansive pop sensibility into the album’s unsettled atmosphere. “Lost Time,” featuring Lily-Rose Depp, closes the record with a quieter sense of reflection.
Not every experiment lands equally well. “Troye Meets World,” with its more frenetic production and drum-and-bass influences, is among the album’s more divisive moments. The Guardian’s review identifies it as a weaker point in an otherwise inventive collection, while the Financial Times takes a more critical view of the album’s overall coherence.
Those reservations are worth taking seriously. She’s the Best is not consistently as immediate as a tightly constructed mainstream pop record. Some tracks benefit from their loose, atmospheric arrangements; elsewhere, the movement between ideas can feel less resolved.
Still, the album is more interesting than a straightforward sequel to Something to Give Each Other precisely because it does not seem determined to reproduce that record’s momentum.
Sivan is making a less obvious pop record
The album’s production helps explain its varied character. Sivan worked with a group of collaborators that includes Jack Antonoff, George Daniel, Cirkut, Finneas and longtime collaborator Leland, alongside other writers and producers.
The result draws on several musical traditions without turning the album into a simple exercise in genre. There are echoes of ’90s dance music, trip-hop and alternative pop, with moments that move away from the clean, immediate structures of conventional radio pop. Pitchfork’s coverage of the title track and NME’s album review both place the record within this more exploratory, after-hours direction.
The important point is not that Sivan has suddenly become an experimental musician. He remains a pop artist, and melody is still central to the album. What has changed is how much space he is willing to leave around it.
On Something to Give Each Other, many of the songs were built around the anticipation of release: the hook, the drop, the moment when a private feeling becomes something communal. On She’s the Best, some of the more revealing passages come when that release is delayed or withheld.
That approach can make the album less immediately accessible. It also allows Sivan to explore a different kind of tension, one in which pleasure and uncertainty are not opposites but parts of the same experience.
The album does not abandon the dance floor. It simply stops treating the dance floor as the only place where something meaningful can happen.
The question of where Sivan fits now
There is an interesting contradiction at the center of Sivan’s career. He is an established international pop artist who can headline major tours, work with prominent collaborators and bring actors such as Nicole Kidman and Lily-Rose Depp into his musical projects. Yet his career has not been defined by an uninterrupted succession of blockbuster singles.
That position gives him room to move between mainstream pop and more personal, less immediately commercial material. It does not automatically make every experiment successful, but it makes the choices on She’s the Best easier to understand.
Commercial ambition and artistic ambition are not opposites, and a pop album does not need to become stranger simply to be taken seriously. What matters here is that Sivan’s shift in direction feels connected to the experiences he has described, rather than like an attempt to distance himself from the success of his previous record.
His strongest asset has never been a single genre. It is his ability to move between intimacy, sexuality, fashion, dance music and melancholy without entirely abandoning the language of mainstream pop.
She’s the Best continues that approach, even when its ideas do not always come together neatly. It is not as immediately recognizable as Something to Give Each Other, nor does it offer an obvious successor to “Rush.” What it offers instead is a more complicated picture of the person behind the nightlife, the performance and the carefully constructed pop image.
The party is still there. It just isn’t the whole story anymore.
For Sivan, that may be the more useful place to go next.
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