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

Troye Sivan is lonely. Across much of his fantastically strange new album She’s the Best the Aussie pop star is in a funk, alienated in hotel rooms and yearning (often quite desperately) for The One.

I have a theory on all this, I tell Sivan. I’m trying to explain it to him while a record label publicist sternly messages me to “keep the discussion focused on music”, as though it isn’t all the same thing.

It’s the weddings, I say. He was there at his bestie Charli XCX’s lavish Sicilian wedding, right? “Yes,” says Sivan.

Was he at Taylor Swift’s wedding? “No …” he replies. (My bad, I should’ve known that, considering Charli and Swift’s icy detente. Pop stars have to pick sides, too.)

Was he at Dua Lipa’s wedding? “I was,” he replies.

That’s what I’m saying: it’s a lot of weddings to go to within a year. And big weddings, too. Probably, in fact, the biggest weddings, judging by tabloid attention. All those weddings can get to a singleton’s head; leave you wondering what you’re doing wrong. Especially at the tender age of 31, which Sivan turned in June.

“I think that’s definitely part of it,” says Sivan. “I grew up in suburban Perth and then lived in a very tight-knit Jewish community in Melbourne. Everyone turns 26-ish and gets married. That’s just what we do! But I felt no pressure from that because I had other-ised myself so much by moving overseas and being gay and whatever, so I was like, OK, I don’t need to follow the same timeline as everyone else.

“And then, all of a sudden, my music industry friends who are busier than me are getting married and it’s like, OK, that’s not an excuse any more. They have crazier work schedules than I do and they managed to get married, so I’m like, f—! What do I do? Maybe I do need to get on it. I definitely started to feel the normal kind of societal pressure, where I’m like, oh, it’s time, for sure.”

Sivan, ever the jet-setter, is speaking from a hotel bed in Austin, Texas. Later that evening he’ll take the stage at the Austin City Limits festival, where headline act Charli XCX has gifted him several minutes of her stage time to debut songs from his new album.

Much of She’s the Best looks to reset the public perception that attached itself to Sivan following the wild success of his chart-topping 2023 album Something to Give Each Other. That album, with its clubby hedonism and post-lockdown celebration of Melbourne’s queer nightlife, established Sivan as pop’s ultimate party boy. His subsequent Sweat tour – a co-headlining gig with Charli XCX at her “Brat summer” peak – found Sivan deftly at pop culture’s apex, where slime-green celebrity cameos and Apple cam-dances went viral every night.

From an outside perspective it seemed crazy: non-stop parties, glitz and decadent glamour. Each time we’d see Sivan he’d be at a Met Gala or walking at Paris Fashion Week or, yes, at a wedding, with another beautiful celebrity from my fantasy list of famous friends.

“Oh, really?” says Sivan. “Like who?”

I mean, Charli, obviously. Rachel Sennott and Lily-Rose Depp (his co-stars in the much-maligned The Idol; the latter also sings in French on She’s the Best’s closing track). Is pop icon Addison Rae in his crew? “Yep,” he says.

Who else, The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri? “She’s part of it, too, yeah. Love Ayo,” says Sivan.

See what I mean? “Yeah, all very, very funny women.”

What’s it feel like being in those spaces? When Sivan’s doing the Sweat tour, for example, does he realise he’s sitting in on a generation’s coolest party?

“Definitely,” he says. “That was a special time, and I think we were all very aware of how special it was while it was happening. It was this kind of ‘stars aligning’ moment. [Sivan’s single] Rush came out and it started to do better than most of my other stuff, and then Brat came out and it was this absolute tsunami in our lives. It was magical.”

She’s the Best feels like the natural, inevitable, discombobulating comedown. Across the album Sivan paints a picture of himself alone in fancy hotel rooms in a post-gig high, self-pleasuring while dreaming of the special boy he’s yet to meet (or worse, an ex he won’t forget). You can practically see him staring into the vanity mirror, humming The Smiths’ I Know It’s Over to himself: “If you’re so very entertaining … why do you sleep alone tonight?”

How heavy did he get with those thoughts? Were there dark nights of the soul amid the comedown? “I think that, you know, it’s easy to not really know how to process stuff like that,” Sivan says of his sudden disillusionment with his post-Rush frenzy. “One also kind of exacerbates the other, where you just get busier and start leaving less time for things that might ground you, and then it can be a bit of a spiral.

“I think I needed to take some time off, to try to fill my cup in ways other than work. But it became easier to isolate and hide behind the work and just keep going, rather than addressing all the feelings. I think a lot of the writing process for this album was me trying to work through that tension and figure out, OK, what do I actually want? How do I feel about what’s been happening? How do I want the next 10 years of my life to look?”

That process takes Sivan to some nakedly vulnerable places. On the sample-delic highlight I Do This for You he’s vamping onstage in line with his hedonistic persona, before literal pop-up ads – “Find hot singles in the Los Angeles area!” – interject with a hard dose of reality.

“It’s a pop-up ad I’m getting on my computer while I’m trying to get to a porn site,” Sivan explains. “It made me laugh but it was also unfortunately so true – the idea that I’m performing on stage, like, ‘Hey, I’m the best’, and then going home to the reality of it. It sums up the whole album in one song.”

‘I think if I felt the need to ask the person to sign an NDA, I’m on a date with the wrong person.’

On Sex Star, another album highlight, he mocks his own oversexed image – “Got a fake tan and a trainer/Got a six-pack and coconut skin” – as the song devolves into lusty desperation. “That song literally started with me getting a personal trainer and getting a spray tan,” Sivan says, laughing. “I was like, I’m really trying to become what I think guys want. I’m skinny and pale but maybe if I was ripped and tanned, things would be different.

“It comes back to the disconnect I was feeling. I was on stage promoting this very hypersexual image and album [Something to Give Each Other], and for a time that felt true. But I just didn’t feel like that in my everyday life any more.”

Unlike the casual libertine of yore, much of the album – Cowboy, Le Boy, FF, Love So Big It Hurts – finds Sivan yearning for true love. It begs the question: what’s it like going on dates now as Troye Sivan? Does the other person have to sign an NDA or something?

Sivan laughs, and the publicist’s warning pops up again. “No NDAs. I think if I felt the need to ask the person to sign an NDA, I’m on a date with the wrong person,” he says. “I’ve been living in New York for a couple of months now for the first time in my life and I’m finding it really easy to meet people in real life. So not all hope is lost, I would say.”

It’s odd seeing such discomfort in pop-star life from Sivan, who just an album ago was relishing the spotlight. It must be the Australian in him; we’re not built for such self-aggrandisement. I ask him if he’s ever seen the documentary In Bed with Madonna. “I haven’t,” he says, shockingly.

To me, that film feels like the ultimate instructional guide on how a pop star should live. Set during her 1990 Blond Ambition world tour, Madonna revels in all of it. In one scene, talking to her then-bestie Sandra Bernhard, Madonna casually decides she’s attracted to Antonio Banderas and that she’s going to fly to Madrid to hook up with him. Barely a scene later she’s flirting with Banderas at dinner, right in front of his then-wife, Spanish actress Ana Leza. What’s stopping Sivan from living like that?

“Wow, OK, I should watch that and take some tips,” Sivan says facetiously.

He was onstage with Madonna at the MTV VMAs just last week, when she chanted his instantly viral catchcry – “Party in the bush!” – from his new single, Party (the song samples Madonna’s Music). “Immediately my mind went to Australia,” says Sivan. “I was so proud of that, the queen of the dance floor saying, ‘Party in the bush!’”

One of the fun things around this album’s rollout has been watching Americans trying to decipher Sivan’s heavy Australianisms. Most are clueless, but I’d imagine Madonna knows what a bush doof is. “I think so, yeah,” says Sivan.

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.

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