‘Not all hope is lost’: Troye Sivan, pop’s ultimate party boy, is just looking for love

Is it important for him to represent Australia on the world stage or is he just doing what comes naturally? “I definitely have a sense of pride,” says Sivan, noting that Party’s credits are stacked with locals, including his younger brother Tyde Levi, and producers Rob LFO and Styalz Fuego.

“Australia has an awesome music scene and it’s been very impactful on my life. I’m that annoying guy that, if I’m overseas and I hear someone in a lift start talking and I hear the Australian accent, I’ll always be like, ‘wait, where are you from?’ I think a bit of it is the homesickness that comes out when I’m away.”

It’s also why he brought Nicole Kidman, pop’s prevailing muse, into his She’s the Best video. The pair worked together on the 2018 film Boy Erased, and Sivan has said that seeing Kidman’s performance in Moulin Rouge as a child was key to his “gay awakening”.

“It almost feels like we have a parasocial relationship with her just by being Australian, where before I knew her I felt like I already knew her,” he says.

Along with its push-pull dynamics around pop, what’s most striking about She’s the Best is its sonic adventurousness. Across much of the album Sivan employs sing-speak vocals that lie somewhere between Lou Reed and rapping, and heavy use of samples inspired by The Avalanches’ Since I Left You, cult Swedish indie-pop band The Radio Dept, and a deep dive into Shibuya-kei artist Cornelius.

“I’m used to making clean, structured, technically precise pop songs but this time the bigger challenge felt like making something that was really fluid and unpredictable and alive,” Sivan explains.

He was listening to Cornelius’ bonkers Mic Check and wondering, why does this music have so much life in it? “I realised it’s because it has sounds from the real world in it, sounds that have their own stories. It reminds me of buying a T-shirt that has been distressed to look vintage versus buying an actual vintage tee – you can tell, you know? One has life and the other doesn’t.”

In interviews Sivan has spoken about the album’s texture and relative sloppiness as a reaction to AI music. “I get sent links to songs that are on Spotify, that have been officially uploaded, and it’ll be my voice on a song I’ve never heard before. And that song will have perfect structure and flow and it uses all the pop tricks, and I just think that is so weird and horrifying,” he says.

“I think it’s such a privilege to be able to work with real instrumentalists and musicians, and maybe subconsciously the whole AI thing just pushed me further in that direction where I was like, ‘I want people playing flutes on this album!’” He laughs. “I really wanted this to feel as chaotic as my human experience has felt over the last few years.”

There’s an understanding in pop lore that the fourth album is the artist’s album – the one where they’ve earned the right to take no notes, to follow their muse to the extreme. “I mean, I definitely made this one for myself,” says Sivan. “This is me at my most experimental, for sure. I made things that felt genuine and cool and true to me, and I would say that was the goal.”

He says it’s been hard to choose singles ahead of the album’s release, fearing it might lead fans down the garden path. Singles She’s the Best, a mid-tempo bop celebrating femininity, and Party, a doof-ready rager, are far from indicative of the album.

“I was like, ugh, people are gonna think I made a party album – which I haven’t, really,” Sivan laments. “But all I ever really want is to feel understood, and this is the best way I can express myself. So hopefully people see me in the album and maybe a bit of themselves in the stories I’m telling and the feelings I’m feeling.”

Troye Sivan’s new album She’s the Best is out now.