Troye Sivan Goes Weird and Wins on 'She's the Best'

Troye Sivan has released his fourth album, "She's the Best," and Variety's review calls it his best — and weirdest — record to date. The 12-track album favors aesthetic ambition over chart-ready immediacy, a deliberate pivot from a pop star who, at 31, has spent more than half his life in the public eye.

The record arrives after 2023's "Something to Give Each Other," which Sivan teased as a post-pandemic dance-pop fantasia with singles "Rush" and "Got Me Started." That album split its attention between dancefloor escapism and the emotional wreckage of a relationship. It was a mature step, the review notes, but it also showed an artist still figuring out both his sound and his public self as one of pop's leading gay male artists.

He could have gone full party this time — the lead single "Party" certainly points that way. Instead, Sivan uses the new album as a canvas for introspection while testing how far pop convention can bend.

What does the album actually sound like?

Across a dozen tracks, Sivan leans on '90s touchstones, moving from glitch-hop (a genre built on chopped, stuttering digital textures) to drum and bass. The review describes it as "a wild ride of an album that goes to many, many places." What it lacks in uniformity, it makes up for in ambition.

The credits read like a roll call of pop's current studio elite:

• Jack Antonoff
• George Daniel
• Finneas
• Tayla Parx
• Sivan's longtime collaborator Leland, who co-writes every track

The album is dedicated to the women around him, "the ones who radiate strength as much as they do cool," per the review. There's still fun to be had — the deadpanned "Party," or the UK garage-powered "Troye Meets World" with its thesis "music meet body, body meet music." But the record's real subject is lust, desire, and longing for permanence in an unstable world.

How personal does it get?

Very. The review highlights the plucky "Cowboy," where Sivan croons about a man who came to him in a dream, and the twinkling "Embarrassingly," an admission that he pleasures himself to the thought of a former lover. On "I Do This For You," he sings: "Find hot singles in the Los Angeles area. Sorry for descending into some type of hysteria, I'm just a little lonely."

These are deeply personal admissions for a mainstream pop album, yet Sivan makes them feel plainspoken — sometimes, the review cautions, maybe a bit too plainspoken. Just ask anyone who stumbles onto "Canada Dry," described as a "slinky back arch pop" song about a Canadian he wants to, in the review's delicate phrasing, engage with.

What does this change for Sivan as an artist?

The mechanism here is restraint. Sivan isn't the most gifted singer — the review notes he'd agree himself — but he's learned to wield his voice as its own instrument. He "sings in italics, not bold," adding to the production rather than overpowering it. On "FF," he slinks across a languid breakbeat on the verses — "Grab the neck of your guitar in a way that makes me jealous, better play it for me" — before slipping into an Auto-Tune falsetto on the chorus, his voice carried away in a wash of instruments.

The review frames Sivan as much a curator as a performer, someone who cares more about tone and storytelling, as he's said, and prioritizes accordingly. His career — from young Australian YouTuber to pop star making sense of his sexuality in public, with canonically queer singles like "Bloom" and "My My My!" — has always suggested he's one hit away from the next level of pop stardom. "She's the Best" forgoes that easy route for songs that reward closer listening, revealing layers of emotion and melancholy beneath the synths and the chug of guitars.

The result, per the review, is a snapshot of a mainstream artist unafraid to pivot off convention so long as it plays to his strengths. Sivan has been doing this for over a decade, yet he's "never sounded so sure of what kind of artist he is, even when he sings of his own uncertainty." Very few artists can hold those truths at once. The question now is whether the audience that wanted the next "Rush" will follow him into the weird — but on this evidence, he's built the kingdom either way.