Troye Sivan has fallen in love with a man he hasn’t met yet, and he’s made a rather lovely song about it. ‘FF’, the new single accompanying his fourth studio album, She’s The Best, is an exercise in romantic anticipation, the sort of heady, slightly delusional longing that has you imagining an entire life with somebody whose name you don’t even know. As Sivan himself puts it, it’s an undying love song to a man he doesn’t know yet. “It might sound like a vow, but it’s really a wish.”
Written and produced alongside Jack Antonoff, George Daniel, Cirkut, Madison Love, Leland and Jasper Harris, the track finds Sivan embracing the delicious uncertainty of wanting something that hasn’t happened. Its most direct declaration imagines a love built to last, all concrete and steel, a permanent structure against the fleeting pleasures of the present. It’s romantic, certainly, but there’s an unmistakable loneliness beneath the fantasy.
‘FF’ sits at the heart of She’s The Best, an album that finds Sivan taking stock after the whirlwind success of Something To Give Each Other. That record delivered the career-defining singles ‘Rush’, ‘One Of Your Girls’ and ‘Got Me Started’, amassed more than 2.2 billion global streams and culminated in the SWEAT Tour alongside Charli xcx. Not a bad few years by anyone’s standards.
But as is often the case, the view from the other side of all that success can be quite different. The empty hotel rooms, the quiet after the crowds have left, the solitude that can creep in when the touring stops: these are the experiences that have helped shape the new record. Sivan describes it as a painting of his life in all its moods and colours, balancing the exhilaration of recent years with the introspection that bubbled beneath the surface.
Where the title track celebrates the women and femme people who have shaped his life, Party revels in nightlife’s freedom and euphoria. Elsewhere, the album turns inward, exploring the more complicated feelings that don’t necessarily make it onto the dancefloor.
There’s a creative shift here, too, with Sivan taking the production reins for the first time and recording much of his vocals from home. Returning to something of the bedroom-made freedom of his early musical life, he says he wanted to create something genuinely individual, “that only I could make“.
If Something To Give Each Other captured the rush of connection, She’s The Best looks at what happens when the lights come up. The party might be over, but the feelings are only just getting started.
