Put yourself in Troye Sivan’s shoes—maybe the thigh-high green and white Isa Boulder boots he wears in the video for “One of Your Girls.” And imagine bouncing back and forth between the adrenaline rush of co-headlining arena shows with his close friend Charli xcx in the middle of Brat Summer, and the solitude that followed when he returned to his hotel room each night—alone and single.
Those two emotional extremes form the vibe of his next album, She’s the Best, out October 9. The first single, and title track, is out today, along with a music video starring Nicole Kidman, roughly nine months after he first started teasing his new collection of songs.
“There’s almost like two, kind of, sides to the album,” Sivan said at a Los Angeles listening party last week. One takes place onstage, where he gets to live out the fantasy of being a pop star. The other is more intimate and unsettled, carrying what Sivan described as “this really deep…sense of longing.” Together, he said, the songs tell “the complete story” of the roughly three years since his 2023 album Something to Give Each Other came out, which produced hits like “Rush,” “One of Your Girls,” and “Got Me Started. ”
It’s an appropriate concept for what Sivan has jokingly called a “very albumy album”—one that’s tied together by specific moods and made to be listened to as a whole. And it finds the 31-year-old pop star pushing further into the tensions that have defined much of his adult life: between femininity and masculinity, loneliness and belonging, the person he was raised to be and the gay idol he has become.
Sivan said that while writing the title track and first single, “She’s the Best,” he found himself thinking about the women and femme people who have always been there for him: a high school English teacher he idolized, trans women he knows, and even “the feminine inside of me.” Through career and relationship turmoil, he realized, “I have always…existed in the orbit of an incredible woman and an incredible femme person.” While the song has a bit of sad girl-pop vibe, it contrasts well with the more house-music-inspired dance tracks on the album.
