Troye Sivan She’S The Best: The Australian artist’s fourth album swaps synth-pop polish for hazy, reverb-heavy production and features Nicole Kidman in its centerpiece video.
Troye Sivan has spent the last decade perfecting the art of the sleek pop moment, but on ‘She’s the Best,’ his fourth studio album out today, he’s bulldozed that blueprint entirely. Instead of the crystalline production and radio-ready hooks that defined his earlier work, Sivan leans hard into shoegaze textures and trip-hop grooves, wrapping introspective queer narratives in layers of distortion and atmospheric hum. The result feels less like a reinvention and more like an artist finally making the record he actually wanted to make, regardless of chart positioning or playlist placement.
The sonic shift is immediate and disorienting in the best way possible. Where ‘Bloom’ glittered and ‘In a Dream’ sparkled with precision, ‘She’s the Best’ embraces the murky, the lo-fi, the deliberately obscured. Trip-hop basslines sit underneath vocals that feel wrapped in gauze, guitars dissolve into ambient wash, and the overall texture recalls everything from Portishead to Slowdive. Sivan doesn’t abandon melody entirely, but he refuses to let it sit in the spotlight. Instead, vulnerability becomes the album’s dominant instrument, with his voice often buried just far enough back that you have to lean in to catch what he’s actually saying. This is music designed to be lived with rather than immediately conquered.
There’s no winking here, no irony buffer, no distance between the artist and his material on ‘She’s the Best.’ Troye Sivan has crafted an album that refuses easy categorization, one that demands repeated listens and rewards the listener who comes prepared to sit with discomfort, ambiguity, and genuine emotional exposure. It’s a bold statement from an artist uninterested in playing it safe.
