Troye Sivan (or as I like to call him, the Twink of Pop) is here with a song called She’s the Best, with a music video starring Nicole Kidman, Sasha Colby and an entire contingent of drop-dead gorgeous women, drag queens and trans people. And I can't help but gag. We move through a sublimely shot New York, through buses, a coffee shop, a ballet studio, Chinatown, a club, before Sivan finally appears onstage, in his own diva drag, singing that girl, that girl, wow that girl, while Kidman (the girl in question) watches from the crowd. It is a strange little universe, and somehow it feels exactly like where Sivan should be again.

The song is the first single from his forthcoming album, also called She’s the Best, his first since 2023’s Something to Give Each Other. It arrives after a period in which Sivan had become almost inseparable from the machinery of pop performance itself: touring with Charli XCX, becoming a fashion fixture, appearing everywhere, and increasingly looking like someone who has finally proved they are a mainstay in the industry. What is interesting about this new song is how much of that persona he seems willing to move out of the centre.

It has never been all about the boy

It is an embarrassingly simple concept to anyone who is not clocked into queer culture. Sivan sings sultrily about a woman he adores. He notices the most hyper-specific details of her appearance and personality, and the song keeps returning to this almost delirious fascination with her. The production is slow and cyclical, built around a two-chord movement that gives the song the feeling of a conversation that could continue indefinitely.

Yet the object of his affection is interesting precisely because she does not become a conventional romantic fantasy that women often are contracted to in the larger tradition of writing 'love songs'. This time, she feels like the sort of woman a gay man might spend an entire evening talking about with his friends, elevating her to mythological status because she is funny or beautiful or simply has the correct kind of eyeliner. There is an excess to that admiration that feels very familiar. And it is true—if you have grown up gay, chances are you have fixated on, associated with and unabashedly cherished (parasocially, or not) with women you deemed legendary. These women have also, more often than not, outlived our fascination with the same sex.

Sivan has spoken about She’s the Best as the first time he was not trying to psychoanalyse himself or write about men. The constant in his life, he realised, had been the women and feminine people around him. That shift sounds small until you consider how much contemporary pop has trained us to expect confession from queer male artists. Sivan has spent years making songs about desire, loneliness, sex and the complicated business of being a gay man in public. Here, he seems more interested in looking sideways.

Delectable cameos

Nicole Kidman, as we all know, is an Oscar-winning Australian actress whom Sivan first met while working on Boy Erased. She becomes the centre and beating heart of this strange little gay fantasia of a music video. She moves through a club populated by drag queens and trans women before watching Sivan perform. Then Sasha Colby appears, and we have no option but to cheer. Sivan eventually appears in drag himself (taking on Lady Gaga quite well, unintentionally, to speak my truth). The whole thing has the logic of a particularly elaborate night out that somehow managed to acquire an enormous budget. But Nicole Kidman is more important here than the celebrity cameo suggests.

There is a particular tradition of gay men finding women who become cultural reference points, almost talismans. Madonna. Britney. Janet. Kylie. The women are adored partly for their performances and partly because they offer a vocabulary for expressing things that masculine spaces have historically made difficult. Sivan has talked about looking to women as a gay boy because they represented a sense of safety he did not always find around masculinity.

So Kidman standing beside Sasha Colby at a dressing-room mirror is not simply an image bound to make the rounds on stan twitter; it places two kinds of femininity in the same frame and lets Sivan orbit them rather than dominate the scene.

Maybe this is the gayest thing he has made

What I find most refreshing about She’s the Best is that its queerness is embedded in the social world of the song, and doesn't necessarily announce itself anthemically. It's one of those instances where the music video simply must accompany Troye's lyrics, and, for being one of the few mainstream pop acts trying to keep the music video tradition alive, my 10s are due.

There is a gay man talking about a woman with the kind of intensity usually reserved for a great love affair. There are drag performers in the club. There is Sivan in drag. There is a particular exaggeration in the way the woman at the centre of the song is described, the sort of hyperbole that makes a friend become MOTHER and an ordinary night become EVERYTHING. The FADER's reading of the song captures this wonderfully, as the emotional language is both sincere and knowingly excessive.

This is where I think Sivan is at his most interesting as a pop artist. Queerness does not have to mean explaining queerness every single time. It is indeed refreshing to simply have the chance to revel in the atmosphere a song pursues for it all to just make sense. Perhaps that is what has been missing for so long in our mainstream pop consciousness.

Troye's comeback is to almost disappear

Sivan's voice is partly swallowed by the production, and he eventually gives the double-time outro over to a chant. He has also spoken about reaching a point during his 2024 tour with Charli XCX where he felt he only knew how to exist as himself onstage. That makes She’s the Best feel stranger than a straightforward comeback.

Sivan is still performing. He is still building a world around the song. He is still giving us an image of himself that is almost impossibly well considered. Yet the song keeps pushing him towards the edges. Kidman gets the entrance. Sasha Colby gets the frame. The drag queens fill the club. The girl he sings about sounds impossibly cool. She’s poly in a chic way, somehow booked as a DJ six nights a week, “takes down an incel on the internet when she needs just a little unwind.” A completely infatuated Sivan, for once, gets to be the person watching, narrating, and admiring her impossible levels of cool. And that feels more at home for us queer listeners than anything else that has come out this year. This is the fresh perspective I wanted from male pop stars in particular and music in general, without knowing I wanted it.

Sivan does not need to prove that he can make gay pop. He has already done that, and with impeccable execution and cultural longevity. What makes She’s the Best exciting is that he seems to be committed to a larger project of documenting the queer experience, down to its finest yet messiest truths. For the first time, in this writer's opinion, Sivan is attempting to make pop gay.