Troye Sivan Says This Is the First Time He Didn't Write About Men

Troye Sivan has built a career on writing about men. His new single is the first song he says he has written that is not about one.

“She’s the Best” arrived on 14 August through Interscope, the lead single and title track of his fourth studio album. It runs four minutes and fourteen seconds.

The Subject Changed and So Did the Sound

Sivan’s own account of the shift is unusually direct. “She’s the Best was the first time I wasn’t trying to psychoanalyze myself, and I wasn’t writing about men,” he said. “The one thing that has been constant in my whole life is the women in my life, and the feminine people in my life.”

He listed the specifics: making music with Ariana Grande and Lily-Rose Depp, and touring with and growing up alongside a fellow pop artist he has worked with repeatedly. “I’ve always just loved being in the orbit of these women.”

On Instagram he was more effusive. “Boys have come and gone, work has come and gone, but I have always, always had my girls,” he wrote. “My whole life I’ve existed in the orbit of incredible women. This is my love letter to them.”

The musical change follows the lyrical one. This is a departure from his dance-pop, built on a trip hop beat with distorted guitars and spoken-word vocals — three elements that have not featured heavily in his work before.

Trip hop is a particularly loaded choice. It is a form built on slowness and space, where the vocal sits inside the arrangement rather than on top of it, and it is close to the opposite of the propulsive dance-pop that made him.

A Week of Cryptic Posts

The rollout began on 6 August with a series of teases: a headshot of Sivan in theatrical makeup, updates to his website, a video of posters carrying the initials “STB”, and photographs of Sivan and Addison Rae in elaborate wigs captioned with the same three letters.

The album was announced on 13 August with a fourteen-second teaser for the title track, ending on the song’s release date. The single followed the next day.

A week from first tease to single is fast, and initials-only teasing only works for an audience already watching closely. It is a campaign designed for people who will decode it rather than for people who need to be told.

The wigs and theatrical makeup were doing work too. Read in hindsight, a week of images of Sivan and a friend in elaborate hair was announcing the record’s subject before a word of it had been heard.

The song was also premiered live a day before release, in a promotion with TikTok — the platform doing the work that radio once did for a lead single. Our piece on the sync pipeline for synth music covers how placement now functions as distribution.

Four Producers and Five Writers

The credits are dense for a single. Sivan produced it with Jack Antonoff, George Daniel and Styalz Fuego, and the song is written by Sivan, Antonoff, Daniel, Leland and Kaelyn Behr.

Antonoff is the most recognisable name and, on a record moving away from dance-pop, a logical one — his production has consistently favoured live instrumentation and space over programmed rhythm.

George Daniel comes from a different direction, as a drummer and producer whose work has straddled band records and electronic production, which fits a track built on a trip hop beat with real guitars over it.

Leland has been a long-standing Sivan collaborator, and his presence keeps a thread back to the earlier records even as the sound changes. Five writers on a song this personal is a lot, but a love letter can be edited by committee without losing the sentiment.

Styalz Fuego is the other Australian name on the production, which matters more than it looks. Sivan grew up in Perth and has kept working with people from home through a career run largely out of Los Angeles and London.

Four producers on a four-minute song is also a signal about how carefully the departure was managed. A genre change executed by one producer is a bet on one person’s instincts; four means the sound was arrived at by argument.

A Video Full of Women

The video follows the song’s logic literally. Nicole Kidman appears, alongside the American drag performer Sasha Colby and Sivan’s own sister, Sage.

That casting is the argument made visible. A song about the women and feminine people in his life, illustrated by an Australian film star, a drag performer and his sister, covers three quite different registers of the same idea.

The trailer set the tone before release: figures in sequined gowns and oversized fur coats, a glowing neon “SISTERS” sign, and Sivan walking city streets in a tailored suit, before stylised title cards announced the date.

The song also carries an uncredited cameo from a close friend and frequent collaborator — their fourth song together after “1999”, “2099” and “Talk Talk”, and a person now married to one of the record’s producers.

Sivan described that appearance carefully. “I don’t want to speak for him, but I think for both George and I, [she] is obviously a very, very, very special person to both of us, and so to have her on that song in some small way is very meaningful to us.”

Where This Leaves the Fourth Album

Sivan’s last single, “Talk Talk”, came in 2024, so this is his first release in roughly two years and the opening move of a new record.

Leading a campaign with a genre change and a subject change at once is the higher-risk version of a comeback. Either alone gives listeners something familiar to hold onto; both together asks them to accept a different artist.

What makes it defensible is that the change is explained rather than performed. Sivan has said exactly what he was doing differently and why, which converts a departure into a stated intention.

It also solves a problem specific to his catalogue. An artist known for writing about desire and heartbreak eventually runs out of new things to say about it, and the alternative to repetition is finding a different subject entirely.

There is a further layer to the subject change that the coverage has mostly skipped. Sivan is one of the most prominent openly gay pop stars of his generation, and a catalogue about desire between men has been part of what that visibility meant.

Writing a song in praise of women, from that position, is not a retreat from the earlier material. It reads more like an acknowledgment that the people who sustained the career were not the people the songs were about.

His phrasing includes both — “the women in my life, and the feminine people in my life” — which widens the subject past a straightforward gender category and explains why a drag performer sits alongside a film star in the video.

Whether an album can sustain what a single establishes is the open question. On the evidence of one song, the fourth Troye Sivan record is not going to sound like the third.

She’s the Best is out now on Interscope.