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In a statement accompanying his fourth album, Troye Sivan describes She’s the Best as both a painting and a letter. It is dedicated to “the Girls I love and know who have always been there” and “him, whoever and wherever he is.” In the title track’s music video, “she” is alternately Nicole Kidman, Sasha Colby, and the most glamorous sometime DJ living off the Morgan L train stop. “He,” on the other hand, is a shadow and a stranger’s dick pic; a ghost of relationships past and an unreachable mirage somewhere out in the future. “She” can be easily contacted for late-night heart-to-hearts or conjured in vibe via good music and the right cocktail of drugs. “He” materializes in fragments and springs on Sivan in low moments, undercutting his glamorous life with harsh reminders of the basic intimacy he lacks.
Sivan’s previous record, Something to Give Each Other, was a breakthrough that liberated him from the YA preciousness of his early career. By trading booming yet treacly ballads for sample-driven dance music, the Australian musician set a high-water mark for contemporary queer pop, infusing effortless sexuality into the beat without straining to sell the particularity of being gay gay gay. Even when he was pining, thirsting, and patently down bad, Sivan could phrase his longing with unbelievable finesse. The record’s eclectic production felt lived-in and artful, so that even when he was expressing thorny emotions, the songs were still suited to his charisma. On She’s the Best, Sivan maps his music onto the shifting shape of the man of his dreams, taking the pop forms he’s established and loosening them to accommodate bigger samples, harsher vocal effects, and much more dissonance. He’s never sounded more massive and never quite so alone.
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After co-headlining with Charli xcx at the peak of Brat Summer, Sivan was struck by his post-show emotional crash, when the roar of stadiums gave way to the quiet of being totally on his own. And so the record is divided between tracks that capture the rush of losing yourself in a sea of bodies and the pain of being caught out at last call with no one to return home to. On “Canada Dry,” Sivan is in a pure flow state, taking a house beat by storm and layering his voice so that its breathy highs and handsome lower register convincingly sells the song’s horny, corny wish (“I wanna sip your body till it’s Canada Dry”) from both ends. It makes for an interesting pair with “I Do This for You,” which heightens the boasting (“Surely can admit, I’m rich, big dick, the shit, I’m it”) as the house synths grow even more brassy and unconvincing. When the beat gives way in the third act, his bravado cuts out too, and Sivan unfurls a bleary-eyed banner advertisement that cements how alone he truly is, singing out the slogan: “Find hot singles in the Los Angeles area.”
This juxtaposition is interesting, but it should carry more impact. Sivan is good at evoking loneliness through imagery, but not always the best at inhabiting it. On a record dedicated to pursuing the vague idea of a person, he mostly approaches the object of his desire at an artsy remove. Consider the elusive “she,” after whom Sivan titles the record and subsequently abandons following the opening song. Over a shuffling beat, he uses his deadpan Aussie drawl to salute a self-possessed party girl who can turn a walk of shame into a runway, sashaying across the city with “a little thin cigarette/Great smile, and a cum stain on her dress.” Despite claiming “she’s the heartbeat bumping in my chest,” Sivan’s identification with her isn’t clear because he’s staked so little of himself on the relationship. “She” is both every woman and nobody in particular, a bundle of free-spirited signifiers stuffed into a bandage dress and fitted with a pronoun. The song makes clear that while Jake Shane might not be this generation’s Truman Capote, Troye Sivan certainly isn’t either.
“He,” however, is more convincing. She’s the Best’s most accomplished tracks forgo the dancefloor and sit with Sivan’s own feelings, inhabiting the ache of not having and not holding until his heart seems primed to burst out of his chest. On “Le Boy,” Sivan ruminates about his love object over a guitar strum, substituting a chorus by sighing over an enormous chasm of reverb, as though the distortion were an extension of his own weighted exhale. “Embarrassingly” goes one step further and identifies the impossible guy in question. Against a star-shower of dreamy guitars, he cops to fantasizing (and masturbating) over his ex, setting Sivan’s heart racing to a beat that seems to climax when he does. “FF” and “Love So Big It Hurts” are epic fantasies of devotion that build and crash like tidal waves, imagining an all-encompassing love that allows the singer to put down roots. There’s a certain vulnerability to saying you want these things, and the epic push-and-pull of the music goes a long way to conveying the violence of Sivan’s feelings.
Sivan is at his best when finding new ways to pair strong ingredients—see the Sixpence None the Richer-sophistipop of “Embarrassingly.” Problems emerge when those distinctive flavors don’t incorporate into the overall mix or too clearly smack of other artists’ sauce. The spoken word on the title track, “I Do This For You,” and “Party” feels stilted rather than evocative. Even with a weapons-grade sample of Madonna’s “Music” to energize “Party,” the beat can’t sustain how tedious it is to hear Sivan list all of the places where one might conceivably party. With its ultra-fast BPM and pretty string flourishes, “Troye Meets World” is the most exciting dance track that the artist has ever sung over, although it loses a certain amount of steam when he cribs PinkPantheress’ flow to circle around the bend of a glittering jungle break. Ditto “Cowboy,” a song whose particular brand of yeehaw yearning is so particularly phrased, it sent me looking more than once for Perfume Genius’ credit.
For Sivan, She’s the Best feels like a transition toward pop music that’s looser, freer, and more emotionally jagged; on songs like “Embarrassingly,” “Le Boy,” and “Love So Big It Hurts,” he proves it’s a viable path. This version of Sivan faces a new challenge: squaring his own taste and hands-on creative direction with the imperative to let painful and conflicted emotions assume their own shape. No matter how many times I listen to the title track or “Party,” I mostly hear musical scaffolding for fully realized, art-directed videos starring Nicole Kidman and Ian McKellan. Even “FF,” which showcases some of the most heart-stopping emotion of his career, feels cheapened by the dumb sexual pun that Sivan has chosen as a shorthand title: an aesthetic shrug to downplay the earnest wish to find a love that lasts fucking forever. The man of his dreams exists so powerfully in the artist’s mind that he can practically see him. When he puts himself on the line and allows his feelings to drift into place, everything comes more clearly into view.
