A calmer, more personal record

Troye Sivan released his fourth studio album, She's the Best, on Friday 9 October 2026. The twelve-track set follows Something to Give Each Other, the 2023 album that reached the top five of the Billboard 200 and No. 1 on the Billboard Dance/Electronic Albums chart. Ouest-France, which heard the album in a Paris studio before release, found it far less club-oriented than its two singles suggested and more melancholic than expected. Vulture called it a frank deconstruction of Sivan's party-boy façade and said it is easily his finest collection of songs to date. Sivan describes the album as a painting of his life in all its moods and colours, and he explained the range of feeling it covers this way:

“There is a side of the album of great intensity, which is really exuberant, and then there are the songs that look like the inside of my mind.”

Songs and singles

Party samples Madonna's 2000 track Music, and The Guardian reports that Madonna apparently gave personal approval for the sample. Ouest-France says the Party video was shot in a castle in England and mixes medieval imagery, dancing and gay sex. According to Der Tagesspiegel, the title track is not a classic dance-pop song but a laid-back spoken-word piece with trip-hop rhythms and distorted guitars, and its video stars Nicole Kidman. The Guardian notes that Charli XCX provides backing vocals on the title track, which was co-produced by her husband, George Daniel. SAPO reports that Sivan produced for the first time on this album and recorded much of the vocals at home.

Sivan on the women and on desire

Sivan told Deutsche Presse-Agentur that the title song is a love letter to the women who shaped him, and that the women in his life were the stable part while much else changed.

“My whole life I have spent surrounded by incredible women.”

The new single FF, which Sivan presents as a love song about desiring someone he has not met yet, was written and produced with Jack Antonoff, George Daniel, Cirkut, Madison Love, Leland and Jasper Harris. Sivan describes it this way:

“FF is an eternal love song dedicated to a man I do not know yet. Or, at least, I think I do not know him. It is my side most marked by desire, and it is about the loneliness of loving someone who is not here yet. It may sound like a vow, but it is really a wish.”

The FF video was directed by Gordon von Steiner, a longtime collaborator, and filmed on Fire Island.

Career context

Sivan was born in 1995 in Johannesburg and grew up in Australia, and Der Tagesspiegel reports that he now lives in Melbourne and Los Angeles. He publicly came out in 2013 in an eight-minute YouTube video. His debut EP TRXYE (2014) debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard 200, followed by the album Blue Neighbourhood in 2015 and Bloom in 2018. After a five-year break, Something to Give Each Other arrived in 2023, led by the Grammy-nominated single Rush.

Billboard reports that over the past year Sivan earned three Grammy nominations, toured with Charli XCX on the Sweat Tour and landed two Billboard Hot 100 hits, Rush and One of Your Girls. The Guardian says his albums have shifted respectable rather than earth-shattering quantities, even as his arena tours and profile far outstrip his chart success.

Critical reception

The Guardian's review argues that Sivan, whose albums have no huge smash hits, deserves to be multiplatinum. Ouest-France describes the twelve tracks as sometimes chaotic and less cohesive than Something to Give Each Other, which it calls both a critical and commercial success in 2023. Sivan himself acknowledges a somewhat chaotic part of the new record, according to Ouest-France, while Vulture places the album among the strongest of his career.