Troye Sivan has shared another taste of his forthcoming album She’s the Best, with a new single, “Party”.
Following last month’s title track, which featured a cameo from Charli xcx and an accompanying video starring Nicole Kidman, “Party” sees the Australian pop star turn his attention firmly towards the dance floor.
Inspired in part by the bush doofs Sivan experienced growing up in Melbourne, the new track attempts to recreate the cyclical feeling of a night out that moves from one place to the next without a clear beginning or end.
“Dance music sounds very different on a dance floor than it does coming out of your laptop speaker. The repetition becomes almost hypnotic, and I wanted to play with structure in that way,” Sivan said.
“Party” samples Madonna’s 2000 hit “Music” and brings together collaborators Luka Kloser, Elvira Anderfjärd, Tove Burman, Leland, Rob Feher and Styalz Fuego, as well as Sivan’s brother Tyde Levi. It marks the first time Sivan and Levi have officially released music together.
“We’ve always made music in the same house. We’ve lived together for almost our whole lives,” Sivan continued. “We’ve always naturally passed music back and forth.”
The single arrives alongside a suitably extravagant video directed by longtime Sivan collaborator Gordon von Steiner. Filmed at a castle in Berkeley, England, the period-set visual imagines nightlife and partying across time, with Sivan and von Steiner particularly interested in its significance within queer culture.
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“When Gordon von Steiner and I were talking about the video and the song, we kept coming back to the idea that partying is actually quite sacred, especially for queer people. Nightlife is often the first place a queer person finds themselves in a room where they’re not the minority, so it becomes a really formative and liberating space for so many of us. And it letting loose is innate to humanity, which I believe it is, then surely people have always partied. We wanted to know what that looked like.. So we went back in time and threw one.”
Alongside Levi, Sivan’s sister Sage Mellet also appears in the video.
The video also features the voice of Sir Ian McKellen, reuniting Sivan with the acclaimed actor years after the pair appeared together in a production of Waiting for Godot in Perth when Sivan was 14. At the time, Sivan was preparing to come out to his mother and has spoken of the impact of seeing an openly gay man enjoying such a successful career.
Sivan’s fourth studio album She’s the Best is due out October 9th. He announced the record in August following a string of cryptic teasers, confirming it as the follow-up to 2023’s acclaimed Something to Give Each Other.
He previously described his forthcoming album as moving between two distinct sides. “There is this high-octane side to the album that feels really bombastic, and then there are the songs that feel like the interior of my mind. There’s this deep sense of longing. The album is a crazy journey,” he said.
We named Something to Give Each Other as the best Australian album of 2023. “Sivan’s third album is a marvellous ode to euphoria and hedonism, the sound of someone assured in who they are as a person and artist. Sivan’s queerness proudly powers Something to Give Each Other, the songs standing as testaments to the transformative nature of finding comfort in one’s own identity,” we wrote.
“The songs on Sivan’s album are dripping with sweat. They feel so alive because the artist who created them was feeling so good when he made them. Just look at that album cover: Sivan smiles ecstatically, his face nestled securely between a friend’s legs in a moment of genuine connection.”
Troye Sivan’s “Party” is out now.
