It took a Saturday Night Live sketch to fully assimilate Troye Sivan, a former video blogger, into mainstream culture. Timothée Chalamet portrayed Sivan as a singlet-wearing apparition, parodying his music video choreography in a hospital room fever dream. Sitting bolt upright, the bewildered patient registers her delirium: “A gay guy!” she blurts out, to which the dancing Troye-via-Timothée responds, “Not just any gay guy… an Australian YouTube twink turned indie pop star.”
On his then-current album, Something to Give Each Other, uninhibited, reference-heavy dance-pop projected a sex-positive soundtrack back onto the very demographic that spurned his online virality. The decidedly subdued follow-up, She’s the Best, finds him languishing in the afterglow, coming to terms with what happens when the rush wears off.
Judging from the promotional strategizing, Troye Sivan seems unsure how to present this. He dedicates the record—and the shoegazey lead single by the same name—to the women in his life (Nicole Kidman counted among them), applauding their allyship and constancy. The female-affirming title is a stretch for a record thoroughly consumed by men. Although the song itself risks reducing these Girls to a procession of Lena Dunham characters, it establishes an atmospheric moodboard: sensory and grainy, the verses summon the parlé-chanté of Serge Gainsbourg, Sivan dryly reciting his admiration atop a smoke-stained drum loop.
This conversational delivery is also exploited on “Party”, a tune so slight that not even hooks lifted from Madonna‘s “Music” can put meat on its bones. Both the song and the expensive-looking short film—ready the armor, cue the horses, phone Sir Ian McKellen!—rescind the title track’s experimental promise, opting instead for a safe continuation of the preceding era. Familiar interlocking formations are mobilized under a click-baiting remit: what if Emerald Fennell staged a medieval tea dance? The Madonna sample helpfully narrates the video’s most provocative shot (“Do you like my ass / Acid rock?”) but Sivan’s singular verse, repeated ad nauseam, never gathers speed. “Party” is a sweatless call to arms that feels like someone beginning to tire of it.
A better votive offering for the Queen of Pop is “Canada Dry”, a libidinous salt lick of a track that ingests the electronic swirl of Madge’s “Impressive Instant” and spits it up again. Sivan is a keen student, and he has paid attention to the master, dousing “I Do This for You” in the same loping trip-hop beat heard on Erotica as he solicits a hookup, then instantly regrets it: “Sit around, talk, and sink deep into my sofa / … wake me when it’s over.”
For all his hedonistic posturing, emotional intimacy remains Troye Sivan’s fix. “I just wanna play, any boy, any girl,” he proclaims on the drum ‘n’ bass-influenced “Troye Meets World”, but in this fragmented universe of flashing lights and silhouettes, what he truly craves eludes him. His lovers are nearly all hypothetical—invented, remembered, or “somewhere out there in the ether”. He fantasizes about being shackled to a “Cowboy” and, on the outstanding Allie X co-write “Embarrassingly”, touches himself to an iPhone camera roll of his ex. Here Sivan hits a sweet spot, effortlessly merging spoken word with melody, coating his shame in dandelion-light acoustic guitars cribbed from the Dawson’s Creek soundtrack.
Where the last album positioned Sivan as a cipher for twinkdom, She’s the Best peers into darker corners. “Sex Star” quickly contradicts its swaggering title, itemizing pressures in the gay community’s physical economy. Cloaked in romantic softness, Sivan lists various concessions he has made—fake tan, six-pack, saucy selfies—in hopes that his partner will “like that kind of thing”. Later, he worries about not having a college education when sparring with a man that does, proving the imposter syndrome that fueled the adolescent panic of “Cool” on his debut, Blue Neighbourhood, has not diminished with age.
Sivan’s transition to adulthood has played out entirely on record. By his second album, he brought his sexuality into full Bloom, publicizing it in a way former teen idols could only dream about. But on his fourth, there is a conscious retreat to domestic safety, away from arena-sized exposure. Half the album’s lyrics specifically refer to homes and houses, and on other tracks the action implicitly occurs there. In some ways, She’s the Best returns to the suburban idyll of that debut; even at his horniest, Sivan’s wordplay craves stability, referring to “me and my baby” as “concrete and steel, like some real architecture”.
In Rolling Stone, Troye Sivan was honest about “feeling deeply lonely a lot of the time”, a confession that mirrors Michael Hobbes’ seminal Huffington Post article on the gay loneliness epidemic, and goes some way toward explaining the detachment that comes with it. On an album pining for connection, the production often builds up his defenses. Collaborators such as Jack Antonoff, Oscar Görres and George Daniel erect thick ramparts around the singer, whether through grungy guitars on “Le Boy” or Sivan’s penchant for vocal manipulation on “FF”, which costs him some of the gut-punch sentiment. Buried underneath, Sivan grows distant, an amber-preserved witness to his life rather than the epicenter of it.
Sivan is a consistently satisfying album artist you can’t deny, even when the choices aren’t all home runs. Sivan still approaches music as he did in his early YouTube videos, inviting listeners into his bedroom where private impulses are forged into lasting artifacts. The writing on She’s the Best, much of it executed with longtime friend Leland, is a vlog of his last few years with the camera selectively switched off; the decision to avoid being pictured on the cover and to appear in drag again in the ‘She’s the Best’ video signals a tug of war between revealing everything and keeping us at arm’s length—intrigued, but potentially unmoved.
Adding to his decade-plus canon of contemporary pop, the album starts to soar when Sivan breaks free of its predecessor’s formula. When it works, it is a vibrant bricolage of Y2K sonics chopped into a midtempo pick ’n’ mix that permits incongruous textures to mingle. Where else could Troye Sivan’s Australian accent sit side by side with a French monologue performed by Lily-Rose Depp? She’s the Best might have had a confusing rollout, but it mostly packages up what “He’s the Best” at.