Troye Sivan Is at His Best on ‘She’s the Best,’ a Weird, Wild Exploration of Desire: Album Review — SkimNews
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- Troye Sivan released his fourth album "She's the Best," a 12-track project ranging from glitch-hop to drum and bass that Variety calls his weirdest and most ambitious, even as it sacrifices uniformity for scope
- Sivan, 31, dedicates the album to the women around him and assembled producers including Jack Antonoff, George Daniel, Finneas, Tayla Parx, and longtime collaborator Leland, who co-writes every track
- The album's central preoccupations of lust, desire, and longing for permanence surface in tracks like "Cowboy" (a man who came to him in a dream), "Embarrassingly" (admitting he pleasures himself to a former lover's memory), and "I Do This For You," where Sivan confesses "I'm just a little lonely"
- "FF" showcases Sivan's vocal flexibility, sliding from a languid breakbeat verse ("Grab the neck of your guitar in a way that makes me jealous, better play it for me") into an Auto-Tune falsetto chorus that gets carried away in a wash of instruments
- Sivan forgoes the easy pop route the review says he's always been one hit single from — instead favoring songs that "invite closer listening" and reveal "layers of emotion and melancholy beneath the veneer of synths and the chug of guitars"
- The album follows 2023's "Something to Give Each Other" and its dance-pop lead singles "Rush" and "Got Me Started," marking a deliberate pivot toward '90s-rooted experimentation over the post-pandemic escapism of that record
Why it matters: For an artist more than a decade into his career — from Australian YouTube origin to canonically queer pop hits like "Bloom" and "My My My!" — Sivan is staking his fourth LP on introspective experimentation rather than the commercial pipeline Variety says he's always been "one hit single away" from unlocking, betting that collaborators like Antonoff and Finneas can amplify a vision built on aesthetic depth over immediacy.
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