Troye Sivan's She's the Best Puts Women at the Center

Troye Sivan has made his most personal record yet out of gratitude. She's the Best, his fourth studio album, arrived on October 9, 2026 via Interscope — and it is, by his own account, a love letter to the women who kept him steady through the loneliest stretches of fame, according to the singer.

Listeners have already crowned it. The album claimed a fifty-six percent share of the vote in Billboard's weekend new-music poll, dwarfing new releases from Cardi B and Slayyyter, as coverage of the poll results showed. For a record that trades club-floor bravado for vulnerability, that is a striking mandate from the audience.

The record is Sivan's first full-length in three years, following Something to Give Each Other from 2023. Where that album pulsed with hypersexual, globe-trotting energy, the new one sits with the ache underneath — bombastic highs set against songs that feel like the inside of his mind, in Sivan's own framing from a press statement. The contrast is the point: this is the sound of someone who got everything he wanted and discovered the wanting had not gone away.

A Video Full of Icons

The title-track video, directed by Gordon von Steiner, wraps its cabaret-glow story around two generations of Australian stardom. Nicole Kidman stars alongside Sivan, drag star Sasha Colby appears, and Charli xcx's voice closes out the track. Sivan said he asked Kidman to take part after the two worked together on the 2018 film Boy Erased, explaining that everyone in the world would understand what the casting was meant to say. He appears in drag himself in the clip, and he has described doing drag for the first time as the moment something unlocked in him around the femininity he once felt pressured to fight.

In a press release, Sivan explained the album's reason for existing in plain terms, according to Numéro. "In the times in my life where I haven't always felt safe or protected by men, women have always been there," he said. "I just have such deep gratitude that I wanted to share, and I wanted to share it in a way that hopefully didn't ever feel patronizing." Growing up in the closet with mostly female friends, and later finding his steadiest creative orbit among women collaborators, gave the tribute its shape.

It is also a deliberate widening of what a pop tribute can be. She's the Best is not a breakup album and not a victory lap; it is a record about the people who hold you together when the spotlight gets heavy. That framing lands differently coming from an artist whose last era was defined by sweat, strobe lights and the communal euphoria of the dance floor.

From Madonna Samples to French Whispers

The album's roll-out kept the guest list coming. "Party," which arrived on September 18, 2026, weaves in Madonna's 2000 hit "Music" and comes with a video narrated by Ian McKellen. The closing ballad "Lost Time" pairs Sivan with Lily-Rose Depp, who whispers in French over the track's final moments. Production runs through Jack Antonoff and a deep bench of pop craftspeople, and the finished record spans about a dozen tracks, pmstudio reported.

The sequencing tells its own story. The title single landed in August with Kidman fronting its first visual; "Party" followed with its castle-set video; then the full album widened the frame all at once — fame at full volume, and the quiet sitting underneath it. Sivan has called the record the truest and most creative version of himself he has ever shared, and the through line is disarming in its simplicity: the work did not save him, and neither did the men. The women did.

Why It Is Landing Now

An album built on platonic gratitude rather than heartbreak is a slightly radical object in pop, and its timing matters. After years of headlines about loneliness epidemics and friendship recessions, Sivan's record names the thing that actually carried him — friendship, steadiness, the people who answer the phone. The poll numbers suggest listeners heard exactly that. It is a different flavor of chart success than the blockbuster runs dominating this month's music news, from Drake's record-breaking chart streak to Fontaines D.C.'s dark new album, and it may be the most emotionally direct of the bunch.

Ten days after release, She's the Best already feels like a thesis statement for this phase of Sivan's career — proof that the biggest pop move left might be sincerity. For anyone who has ever been carried by people the spotlight never finds, the dedication lands exactly as intended.