Troye Sivan just dropped “She’s The Best,” the first single off his upcoming album of the same name — and there’s a surprise cameo on it from his close friend Charli XCX.
The track is an adoring portrait of an unnamed woman, with Sivan coolly narrating everything about her: her appearance, quirks, overall demeanor. Maybe they’re mundane observations to the average person, but to Sivan, every detail is magic. “That girl, wow,” he sings, awestruck. “She’s the best.”
“She’s The Best” was written and produced by Sivan, Jack Antonoff, Leland, Styalz Fuego, and 1975 drummer and Charli XCX husband’s George Daniel, who Sivan had never worked with before. A small snippet at the end includes a special guest: “The vocal that you hear at the end of ‘She’s the Best,’ it’s Charli,” Sivan said during a recent conversation in the Rolling Stone Studio. “We’ve found ways to work these women into the songs. I don’t want to speak for him, but I think for both George and I, Charli is obviously a very, very, very special person to both of us, and so to have her on that song in some small way is very meaningful to us.”
Sivan describes the anecdotes in the song as a collage of, and love letter inspired by, several women in his personal life. “To be able to have made music with Ariana [Grande] or Lily-Rose Depp, then touring with Charli [xcx] and growing up alongside her…I’ve always just loved being in the orbit of these women,” he said.”
“‘She’s the Best’ was the first time I wasn’t trying to psychoanalyze myself, and I wasn’t writing about men,” he added. “The one thing that has been constant in my whole life is the women in my life, and the feminine people in my life.”
The song’s accompanying music video stars Australian actress Nicole Kidman, who Sivan first met in 2018 on the set of the film Boy Erased — and where he first got her phone number. “She’s always just been such a picture of the divine feminine to me,” he said.
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“I sent her the song and I showed her some references for the video,” he remembered. In the middle of a Zoom meeting a bit later, he received a call from an unknown number. “I let it go to voicemail, and then I see the transcription starts coming, it’s like, ‘Hi darling Troye, it’s Nic.’ I slammed my laptop shut and just ended the meeting.”
‘She’s the Best,’ Sivan’s first album since 2023’s Something to Give Each Other, arrives on Oct. 9. “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,” Sivan said.
