Troye Sivan Throws a Church Rave in London, Writing the Dance Floor into His Fourth Album's Healing Chapter
Celebrating the single "Party," Troye Sivan took over a derelict London West End church once the nightclub Limelight, throwing a party and opening up about how his new album *She's the Best* turns the dance floor into a site of healing.
Inside a former Presbyterian church building in London's West End, Troye Sivan is throwing a party. Back in the '80s, this space briefly transformed into the legendary nightclub The Limelight, hosting the likes of George Michael, Grace Jones, and Iggy Pop. Tonight, Sivan has invited a crowd of friends and fans to celebrate the release of his single "Party" — in an hour, he'll step up to the pulpit to personally unveil the music video.
Directed by longtime collaborator Gordon von Steiner, the music video opens on a 15th-century bacchanal, with Sivan weaving through a kingdom of indulgence — cutting from steamy intimacy to tightly choreographed group dance sequences staged by Sergio Reis. "Party" samples Madonna's "Music," and Sivan says he wanted to create the moment where "everyone at the party loses it on the dance floor the second they hear that sample drop." He shared a stage with Madonna at the VMAs just last month, and though the two still haven't officially met, he says clearing the sample went "surprisingly smoothly" — something he "never saw coming."
From *Rush* to *She's the Best*: Three Years of Highs and Lows
This marks Sivan's fourth studio album, arriving two years after 2023's *Something To Give Each Other*, led by the single "Rush." He describes that record as being about re-learning how to feel the world and reconnect with human touch after lockdown; this one is different. "This one feels more like a period of ups and downs — I went back into my own emotions more than I did on the last record," he says, without elaborating further on exactly which emotions. The album speaks for itself.
"Canada Dry" is what he calls a "sticky, slippery" pop track, about desire so intense you want to lick the sweat off someone's skin. "Embarrassingly," meanwhile, he dubs his "masturbation anthem" — with lyrics like "You still meet me in my head / You've been gone twice as long as we were together," capturing a lingering attachment that should've ended long ago but hasn't. The album closes with "Lost Time," featuring a spoken-word verse from *The Idol* co-star Lily-Rose Depp. Its lyrics — "Busy is overrated, I just wanna stay home and create / Be with my baby, make up for lost time" — tie together the record's central tension: the constant pull between chasing what's next and holding onto the present.
That tension bleeds into the production itself. Compared to the polish of his last record, this one feels rougher, more jagged — pulsing electronic beats suddenly cutting into angelic harmonies, a sonic whiplash that mirrors the "highs that were really high, lows that were really low" of the past three years of his life.
The healing on this album comes from therapy, inner-child work, and also from a good night out with his girlfriends. The music video for the title track "She's the Best" stars Nicole Kidman, who met Sivan on the set of the 2018 film *Boy Erased*. In the video, Sivan performs in drag, continuing a thread he started in the 2023 "One Of Your Girls" video. "I love drag," he says with a laugh. "It's such a healing experience — being able to express yourself that fully feels so free and so fun." He also opened up about having long resisted his feminine side, and how he's finally reached a place where his masculine and feminine selves can coexist in peace.
"My biggest fear is making something I think people will like, and then it just doesn't land," he says. "That's when I start thinking, damn, I'm not even listening to my own voice anymore. So the only thing I can really hold onto is making something that's honest to myself." *She's the Best* is out now via Interscope Records.
