Troye Sivan's She's the Best Is the Loneliest Party of His Career

Thirteen tracks. Forty-two minutes. A final cut, twenty seconds long, that turns out to be a teaser for the song that opens the record. Troye Sivan's fourth album ends by advertising itself, and once you register that, the whole thing starts to look like a deliberate self-portrait: a party record that keeps checking whether anyone is still there.

She's the Best arrived on 9 October 2026 through Interscope — the Apple Music listing credits it to Tokky's Music, LLC, under exclusive licence to Interscope Records — following Something to Give Each Other (2023), the album that made him a fixture of the dancefloor and a Grammy nominee. The title track came out in August, "Party" in September. Both are here, and both are load-bearing.

Place it in his catalogue and the record reads as an argument about scale. Sivan has spent a decade as a pop star whose cultural weight exceeds his chart weight, and the credits here suggest he spent the budget accordingly rather than chasing a hit: Jack Antonoff is all over five of the twelve songs (programming, guitar, and sitar on the opener), the 1975's George Daniel is credited on another three, Oscar Görres takes a five-song run from "I Do This For You" onward, and Styalz Fuego anchors the early dance tracks. Reinforcements arrive as woodwind: two saxophonists on "Cowboy." This is an expensive-sounding record that behaves like a small one.

That's the tension worth naming. Sivan has described the writing as split between a high-octane, bombastic side and a quieter one he calls the interior of his mind — and the album's real architecture follows the running order, not the production. His cited touchstones (Madonna, Kylie Minogue, The Avalanches, King Krule, with Annie Ernaux shaping the words) don't belong on the same shelf: aerobic imperiousness, gleaming disco, crate-digging collage, damp guitar miserablism. What he does with them is less synthesis than rotation — three minutes of one mood, then three of another — and discipline is what holds it together. Only two tracks clear four minutes. Nothing sprawls. Ideas get stated and dropped.

"Party" (3:21) is the thesis statement, built on the most debated formal decision here: a lift from Madonna's 2000 single "Music," which reporting around the release says Madonna personally cleared. His delivery is deadpan to the point of blankness — the party enumerated rather than attended, a man scanning the room for the exit. Slight on paper; a smart closing argument in practice.

The title track (4:14) is the other anchor: poised, faintly wistful, carrying backing vocals from Charli xcx on one of Daniel's three productions, with Nicole Kidman in its video. It's the album's most generous writing — Sivan looking outward at someone else's mess instead of inward at his own — and the closest the record gets to warmth.

Between those poles sit the songs that will decide it for you. "Lost Time" is the only track with a featured vocal, Lily-Rose Depp's, and at four minutes one of the few places a mood is allowed to breathe rather than change the subject. "Troye Meets World" (2:43), the shortest real song, is also one of just two where Sivan credits himself on instruments — synthesizer and drum programming — and to my ear it plays like the sitcom its title promises: a whole premise compressed into a sketch you can run twice before the kettle boils.

Start with "Cowboy" (3:24), though. It's one of the two songs Sivan has named as his favourite, and it's where the swagger and the melancholy occupy the same breath rather than taking turns — Antonoff's guitars, a saxophone frontline, and a title that sounds like a costume he's daring you to laugh at. That he picked "Cowboy" and the 2:47 "Love So Big It Hurts" is telling: his favourites are the two shortest songs in the main run, and the instinct is to say a lot in a small room.

Which returns us to that twenty-second closer. As music it's nothing — a fragment, a marketing object, track thirteen of thirteen. But placing it last means the album stops rather than lands: it holds its breath and hands you a trailer. Read it as a wink from an artist who has never minded being in on the joke, or as a failure of nerve at the exact moment this record should plant a flag. I lean toward the wink, with reservations; the trick charms the first time and hollows slightly the second.

Reception has been warm — Metacritic sits at 84 from five critics, a number that means "everyone agrees this is good" more than "this is the one." My own read is more split. This is Sivan's most formally confident and least indulgent album, and the rigour is real: tight songs, no filler, no forced climax. What it doesn't quite do is earn the interior it keeps promising. The bombast is superb; the loneliness is mostly announced rather than dramatised, and the one place he names it outright is also the place he steps back and sells you the album again. ★★★½ — a strong record from a pop star with better taste than most of his peers, and the nagging sense that its best three minutes are in a song only the teaser has heard.

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Troye Sivan's She's the Best Is the Loneliest Party of His Career

Troye Sivan's She's the Best Is the Loneliest Party of His Career

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