Troye Sivan is a remarkable pop stylist—maybe even more so than an actual pop star. When his fluid styling, expressionistic choreo, and tender, sultry studies of house and new wave coalesce, he’s able to fashion a diva drag in the image of his childhood idols: a Madonna cone bra, a Britney-blonde wig, some Janet-lite dance moves. “Something about being a gay boy… You look to these women,” Sivan explained last night at the music video premiere for his new single “She’s the Best,” which he said is about “a feeling of safety that I didn’t always feel in masculine spaces growing up.” The video is just sublime, a gay fantasia on Drake’s “Nice for What.” We get Nicole Kidman and Sasha Colby applying makeup at a vanity mirror together. For that alone, 10s are due.
Sivan, meanwhile, makes the conscious decision to play a side character in his own song. The girl he sings about sounds impossibly cool. She’s poly in a chic way, somehow booked as a DJ six nights a week, “takes down an incel on the internet when she needs just a little unwind.” She probably listens to Tricky’s Maxinquaye, Berlin-era Bowie, and that one Horse Vision song from last year that sampled “Bad Girls” by M.I.A. But what about the boy singing? Sivan’s voice is swaddled—nearly swallowed up, at points—by the mix, and he cedes the song’s double-time outro to a cheer-chant refrain. Last night, he lamented how, while on tour with Charli xcx in 2024, “I felt like I didn’t know how to exist as myself except onstage.” In shifting the spotlight so far off himself, he’s left standing in the half-light.
