“Pah-ty in the pah-rk.” Trust the boy from Perth to get his ahhs right. And isn’t She’s the Best essentially just one deep, pleasurable ahhhhhh in album form? Troye Sivan’s fourth LP is a testament to the sigh of relief—a breathy, deliberately underwritten mood piece soundtracked by sumptuous, faithful turn-of-the-century Balearic and acid house. She’s the Best opens with the lyric “She’s walking down the street with her little thin cigarette” and ends with the reflection: “breaking back in California / getting dick just how I wanna”. So… yeah. It feels nice. It sounds luxurious and comfortable. Often pining, but always indulgent.

The song ‘Party’—I think I would call it a highlight?—features this perfect little elliptical clipped spoken-word passage romanticising a very Australian kind of never-ending weekender (“Party in the bush / party under the bridge / party at the restaurant / party at the…” I’m surprised he doesn’t just name Miscellania outright), which then just repeats itself, somewhat confusingly, over a very UK-sounding breakbeat hardcore groove with an expensive Madonna sample slapped over the top of it. Its medieval music video is narrated by Sir Ian McKellen and features, among other celebrities, my brother’s old housemate whose Amazon Prime account my television is still logged into. If the song comes across as a bit of a garish mélange of influences the way I’ve described it, well, it is, but it is also a vindication of Sivan’s famously good taste that it sounds so fleet-footed.

The rest of the album has softer, if more transparently horny, sensibilities. Sivan is admittedly not the only 2020s popstar leaning into effervescent raunch, but he is surely its most earnest proponent. ‘Sex Star’ pairs a wistful adult contemporary instrumental (reminiscent of Rob Thomas’ ‘Little Wonders’) with  sweetly-sung lyrics like “Park that car / on the bed I’ll be waiting / hard and impatient”. Elsewhere, he rhymes “meditation” with “masturbation”. Size matters on a song titled ‘Love So Big It Hurts’.

These variations on a familiar theme help shape the identity of She’s the Best, though truthfully my favourite songs on the album are a handful of idiosyncratic downtempo numbers that don’t bear much relation to one another. ‘She's the Best’—a gauzy George Daniel production you could very easily imagine Matty Healy wheezing over—finds Sivan’s vocals vaulting from (yet another) gravelly spoken word verse up into the air on the chorus, noisy synths swirling around him, suddenly dumbstruck with wonder: “That girl, that girl / wow, that girl / she’s the best”. ‘I Do This For You’ is a meatier, flirtier trip-hop cut that for all money should be soundtracking the Saturday night Bar Rochford line close, on which Sivan contorts his voice into an impressively percussive instrument, weaving through the song’s syncopated backbeat while sharpening the consonants of its titular lyric to polyrhythmic effect: “I do dis for you!”Mid-song, ‘Le Boy’ upgrades its shaggy, descending guitar lick to a thrilling shoegaze choir that better reflects the intensity of Sivan’s daydreaming about a certain Parisian garçon. 

My two favourite Troye Sivan songs are ‘What’s the Time Where You Are?’ and ‘One Of Your Girls’, placed side-by-side on his last album, and I like them in large part because they don’t make any pretension of their influences—they simply outshine them. The Italo synths and soupy disco strings of the former track are pure Kylie worship, and the track still rivals anything on Fever. The latter sounds like Julian Casablancas, Daft Punk, and everything Harry Styles thinks he could be. She’s the Best is a similarly reverent album, except this time around Sivan pitches his lodestar squarely in the direction of the Queen of Pop. Surpassing whom is a necessarily difficult undertaking. “Music, mix the bourgeouisie and the rebel”, Sivan coos on ‘Party’, making little effort to hide his inspiration. If it’s hard to argue She’s the Best overshadows Madonna’s Music, well, at least we got a nice ahh out of it. Pah-ty at the… wait can you drop me the location real quick?

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Sam Gollings

28 October 2026