Ahead of his third album, 2023’s “Something to Give Each Other,” Troye Sivan teased the era as a dance-pop fantasia with singles “Rush” and “Got Me Started.” It was his post-pandemic record, one that promised to capture the crackle of electricity that came with no longer being on lockdown, finally free to connect with others. But those songs threw off the scent, as Sivan spent just as much time embracing the dancefloor’s escapism as he did sifting through the emotional wreckage of a relationship. What he ended up with was a varied body of work, a mature step forward for an artist who was still figuring out his sound and self as one of the leading gay male artists in pop.
Sivan could have easily gone full party on his fourth album “She’s the Best” — one of its lead singles, the aptly titled “Party,” would suggest as much — but he instead uses the project as a canvas to look inward while testing the pliability of pop convention. Across the dozen tracks, Sivan leans heavily on ’90s touchstones, traipsing from glitch-hop to drum and bass, casting a wide net across sounds and scope. It’s a wild ride of an album that goes to many, many places, but what “She’s the Best” lacks in uniformity, it makes up for in ambition, favoring aesthetic over immediacy in what ends up being Sivan’s best, albeit weirdest, album to date.
At 31, Sivan has been famous for more than half of his life, first as a young YouTuber broadcasting from his native Australia and subsequently as a pop star making sense of his sexuality in the public eye. His trajectory has yielded canonically queer singles (“Bloom,” “My My My!”) that, perhaps backhandedly, have always suggested he’s just one hit single away from unlocking the next level of pop stardom. It’s a path he could have easily continued to take with “She’s the Best,” yet here he forgoes the easy route in favor of songs that invite closer listening, revealing layers of emotion and melancholy beneath the veneer of synths and the chug of guitars.
Sivan dedicates the album to the women around him, the ones who radiate strength as much as they do cool. He enlists a long coterie of producers and songwriters to bring his vision to life, including Jack Antonoff, George Daniel, Finneas, Tayla Parx, and his longtime collaborator Leland, who co-writes every track. As always, he’s wont to have a good time, like on the deadpanned “Party,” or the UK garage-powered “Troye Meets World” with the thesis “music meet body, body meet music.” But “She’s the Best” is more concerned with lust and desire, about longing for permanence in an unstable world.
There’s an interiority to the album that Sivan’s previous records merely gestured towards, on songs like the plucky “Cowboy,” where he croons about a man that came to him in a dream, or twinkling “Embarrassingly,” an admittance that he pleasures himself to the thought of a former lover. He’s quick to surrender to carnal desire, but regularly pines for more. He isn’t the most gifted singer — just ask him, he’ll agree — yet he’s learned to wield his voice as its own instrument, holding the focus at just the right time and letting go when the production takes focus.
On “FF,” for instance, 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,” he sings — before slipping into an Auto-Tune falsetto on the chorus, his voice getting carried away in a wash of instruments. To that end, Sivan is as much a performer as he is a curator of his own vision. He cares more about tone and storytelling, as he’s said, and prioritizes accordingly.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
