Last Friday, Troye Sivan released his best, most daring work yet. She’s the Best marks the singer’s 4th studio album. The record is an eccentric exploration of queer desire, using bold, fresh production choices to finally marry his tried and true bedroom pop softboy-isms with his new party boy persona.
The album starts out on a familiar note. He reminds us why we’re here with the record’s second track, “Party,” which is exactly what you think it is: an undeniable dancefloor banger, reminiscent of his high octane, alkyl nitrate fueled Rush era. “Canada Dry,” the follow up, is its hypnotic, sexier, groovier sibling. Together they form the party-going introduction to the record.
With “I Do This for You,” the album’s sonically distinct fourth track, comes a departure. Using a robotic voice synthesizer, in what feels like an alien transmission from outer space over a sick 90s break beat, Sivan takes us straight from a filled stadium show to a house in the Hollywood hills, pondering what it means to search for connection after the party is over. Over the course of the track, Sivan strips back the celebrity persona and bares his loneliness for us to hear, transitioning into the record’s melancholic core.
The track also introduces the missing lover that haunts the entire album, chanting over and over again like a spell, “I do this for you…whoever you are.” Sivan broke up with his admitted “great love,” the model and director Jacob Bixenman in 2020, after 4 years of dating. The breakup started what I would consider the great breakup trilogy in Sivan’s oeuvre with his 2020 EP In A Dream, released at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we see the genesis of Sivan’s experimental dance pop sound, tinkering around with the moody electronic opener “Take Yourself Home,” and the cult-favorite, heady, synthy “STUD,” but his vision has yet to fully crystalize. Sivan lightens the load with Something to Give Each Other, exploring the post-breakup hook-up fueled highs of single life after love. But now, with She’s the Best, we’ve simultaneously come full circle and upon the cusp of something new. Troye is sad again: the hookups are feeling hollow; fame is isolating. What or who was he looking for, again? Where is that great love at the end of the tunnel? But the sonic production is fresher than ever, and his lyrical ability to accurately capture these complex emotional landscapes is at its absolute best.
On “Le Boy,” the electric guitar filled, 80s inspired heart of the album (which was also almost the title of the album itself), Sivan brings the concept of the missing lover to a feverish pitch, growing impatient and agitated, detailing all the mundane things he’s sick of doing, if only he could find THE BOY to save him from all this. “Where is he?!!” he seems to plead over the bombastic chorus.
He hits familiar beats on “Sex Star,” confessing he just wants to be a “sex star” for his imaginary lover, before recounting their passionate embrace upon his arrival. This lyrical concept is not new for Troye. Here he continues his tradition of constantly turning his body into a site of transformation for a potential lover. He does it on In a Dream with “STUD” (“Could I still be a hunk to you? Enough for you? A stud to you?”) and “10/10” (“I wanna be a ten out of ten for you. Hit it out of the park”); He pushes the concept to its furthest extent on Something to Give Each Other on “One of Your Girls,” where he explores what it would mean to even cross the gender binary to attract his lover: “Give me a call if you ever get desperate; I’ll be like one of your girls.” “Sex Star” finally closes the loop, tapping into an important bodily anxiety within the gay dating world, where gay men seem to face a constant obsession with bodily modification in order to attract the perfect, illusory lover. But one can’t help but wonder when Sivan will cease chameleonizing and begin actualizing towards a healthier connection.
In the fatalistic, sultry closer, “Lost Time,” featuring Lily-Rose Depp’s whispered French over 90s lowkey trip hop, Sivan finally lets the lushness of his melodic voice unfurl, musing of all the ways he’ll make up for the time he lost once his missing lover finally finds him. For his sake, I can only hope that time comes soon.
