Troye Sivan on finding love after the party

In the autumn of 2024, it felt impossible to scroll online without seeing a video from Charli xcx and Troye Sivan’s SWEAT tour. But amid the incessant partying, appearances from their celebrity friends and the duo prancing in matching “thot daughter” and “gay son” tops, Sivan felt increasingly disconnected from the outside perception of his life. “I think it all just got exacerbated by how crazy everything was going,” Troye Sivan says, speaking over Zoom before his surprise appearance during Charli’s ACL set. “I was so just fulfilled and high. I started to really notice how much of a hard time I was having rationalising that and then just trying to figure out how to also feel like I was filling up my cup in other ways.”

The outcome of his conflicting experiences ultimately led to She’s The Best, his latest “exploratory pop” album. A few days after its release, in a completely different environment from the arenas of the SWEAT Tour, Sivan took to the new Apple Music Hall in Battersea for the album’s first show. Speaking about the relief of finally having the project out in the world, he momentarily broke down. Addressing the crowd, he said, “Somewhere along the way I started to feel like a disconnect from the person I thought everyone thought I was and who I actually am and what my life actually looks like.”

Those who grew up on the early internet were first introduced to Sivan on YouTube, where he began posting videos at just 12. Growing up in the suburbs of Perth, Australia, he built an audience long before becoming the pop star we know today. In 2015, he released his debut album Blue Neighbourhood, a sweet 10-track project about leaving home. Despite having over three million YouTube subscribers at the time, its anxieties felt familiar to anyone navigating young adulthood. “I was such a wuss as a kid. I didn’t sleep out until I was 17. I used to make my mom come get me when I was trying to sleep over at friends’ houses,” he explains. “I think I’ve always felt a bit of a push and pull between how ambitious I was versus the things that I really care about and value, like relationships and family.”

“I’m looking for love and a great long relationship. It almost feels like those things oppose each other at times”

His debut was followed by Bloom in 2018 and Something to Give Each Other, his most critically acclaimed album to date. With its sweaty, dance-pop abandon, the latter helped establish the version of Sivan now synonymous with the dancefloor. But She’s The Best is interested in what happens when the music stops. At the root of the project is a question: what comes after the party? If Something to Give Each Other celebrated losing yourself in the night, this album asks who you go home to when the afters is done. “At the core of the album is this love and appreciation for partying and feeling connected to everyone, and then also admitting that I’m actually looking for something that feels more true to this very pure version of myself,” he explains. “I’m looking for love and a great long relationship. It almost feels like those things oppose each other at times. I think that the album explores that tension because I do want both.”

Wanting to make the album more unpredictable, Sivan loosened his grip on the precision that defined its predecessor. “I’ve been obsessed with making perfect pop my whole life, and I still am. I’ll forever be fascinated by that,” he says. “But because I really pushed myself to do that on my last album, this time I wanted something that felt a little bit more free and almost manic to align with how I was feeling.” Written mainly at home with his brother, the record gave him room to experiment with the structures and tricks he had spent years learning.

At a time when diaristic songs about hedonism as the world burns can fall a bit flat, it was important for Sivan to look beyond the familiar tricks of pop. “They can help you tell a story so clearly and perfectly, but also sometimes I think that they can make things feel a bit too contrived,” he says. “And I didn’t want this music to feel like that. I really wanted it to feel like it was just something that was happening and I was following the inspiration or the instinct.”

Musically, Sivan was drawn to Cornelius and Arthur Russell. He also found inspiration in Annie Ernaux’s A Simple Passion, an autobiographical novel about a woman consumed by an affair. “She’s so in love with this man that she is purposely putting herself in these situations where she has time to sit and think about him, so doctor’s waiting rooms and trains and things like that. I just thought that was so beautiful, and I can really relate to lamenting over someone like that.”

That willingness to sit with desire runs through She’s The Best. Rather than treating yearning as something to overcome, Sivan finds a certain pleasure in not knowing how things will turn out. Despite their sonic differences, two songs, “Canada Dry” and “Sex Star”, capture this tension particularly well. As Sivan puts it, “I had never thought about those songs as sister songs, but in a way they absolutely are. It’s very real because I think that those two songs alone tell the story of the album. On the one hand, you’ve got ‘Canada Dry’, which is full of this bravado and confidence. And then there’s ‘Sex Star’, which is sort of the same thing where it's still that same desire, but it’s a much more vulnerable version of it. That’s the external monologue versus the internal monologue of when you're trying to meet someone.”

On “Lost Time”, Sivan sings to an imagined man he has yet to meet, building a fantasy around the idea that, when they do finally find each other, the time apart will feel almost beside the point. “I think because it feels like it’s taken me so long to find him, I have this fantasy that when I do meet him, it’s going to feel like we’ve known each other forever and I’m just going to be so fucking pissed that it took us this long to find each other.” 

“When I look back on this chapter of my life, do I want to be looking back and thinking about how sad I was? No, let me honour the people who were there for me during that time”

For all the time Sivan spends thinking about men on She’s The Best, there is one song where they can take a back seat. The title track is dedicated to the women in his life, a reminder that while he might be figuring out what he wants from romance, he knows exactly who he can count on. Writing about women as a whole, though, proved trickier than he expected. “It’s a very grand idea, you know what I mean? To talk about women in general. I was like, ‘How do I do this in a way that's not patronising or reductive or just cliché?’” He eventually found his way in through the people closest to him: his sister, his two best friends, whom he has known since he was two; Lily-Rose Depp, Charli xcx and Madonna, whose music is sampled on the album. Charli chants in the background of the title track, while Depp appears as a spoken voice on “Lost Time”.

Where the album’s other songs circle the uncertainty of romantic desire, “She’s The Best” offers a different kind of love, one that does not leave him wondering where he stands. “All of the tension and conflict and yearning that you feel in the album, there's none of that in “She’s The Best”, the song. I was like, ‘What a relief to not be thinking about these guys and to not be thinking about myself and my place in the world.’” It also gave him a chance to reconsider what he might take away from this period of his life. “Ultimately, when I look back on this chapter of my life, do I want to be looking back and thinking about the yearning and how sad I was and the men and everything like that? No, let me honour the people who were there for me during that time.” For all its fixation on a love that has yet to arrive, She’s The Best makes room for the love that is already there.