Nicole Kidman Goes to the Club in Video for Troye Sivan’s New Single, ‘She’s the Best’

Put yourself in Troye Sivan’s shoes—maybe the thigh-high green and white Isa Boulder boots he wears in the video for “One of Your Girls.” And imagine bouncing back and forth between the adrenaline rush of co-headlining arena shows with his close friend Charli xcx in the middle of Brat Summer, and the solitude that followed when he returned to his hotel room each night—alone and single.

Those two emotional extremes form the vibe of his next album, She’s the Best, out October 9. The first single, and title track, is out today, along with a music video starring Nicole Kidman, roughly nine months after he first started teasing his new collection of songs.

“There’s almost like two, kind of, sides to the album,” Sivan said at a Los Angeles listening party last week. One takes place onstage, where he gets to live out the fantasy of being a pop star. The other is more intimate and unsettled, carrying what Sivan described as “this really deep…sense of longing.” Together, he said, the songs tell “the complete story” of the roughly three years since his 2023 album Something to Give Each Other came out, which produced hits like “Rush,” “One of Your Girls,” and “Got Me Started. ”

It’s an appropriate concept for what Sivan has jokingly called a “very albumy album”—one that’s tied together by specific moods and made to be listened to as a whole. And it finds the 31-year-old pop star pushing further into the tensions that have defined much of his adult life: between femininity and masculinity, loneliness and belonging, the person he was raised to be and the gay idol he has become.

Sivan said that while writing the title track and first single, “She’s the Best,” he found himself thinking about the women and femme people who have always been there for him: a high school English teacher he idolized, trans women he knows, and even “the feminine inside of me.” Through career and relationship turmoil, he realized, “I have always…existed in the orbit of an incredible woman and an incredible femme person.” While the song has a bit of sad girl-pop vibe, it contrasts well with the more house-music-inspired dance tracks on the album.

Sivan’s continued embrace of femininity also feels like another step in his rebellion against the socially conservative religious environment he grew up in. Raised as an Orthodox Jew in Australia, Sivan attended Jewish school before coming out publicly in 2013. But Sivan’s rebellion shouldn’t be mistaken for a rejection of his roots. The artist turned She’s the Best into something of a family affair, working closely with his younger brother Tyde, who is a producer on the album.

Sivan rose to new levels of fame after his last album and the Sweat tour with Charli xcx. And he’s found himself dealing with a classic pop-star paradox: The more famous you get, the harder it is to go out, and the more prone you are to loneliness. Another theme on the new album is what Sivan describes as the innately human need to party and let loose. Yet, the artist told Vanity Fair that it’s becoming harder for him to find those outlets as he’s gotten more recognizable.

As Sivan navigates the age of artificial intelligence, he says he wanted this record to feel human and messy, whereas his goal on Something to Give Each Other, he says, was to create perfect pop music. His life no longer felt “easy to sum up in one sentence,” so he didn’t want the music to feel that way either.

There is Sivan under the lights, living out a fantasy of his pop star dreams. And then there is Sivan after the lights go down, heading back to the hotel alone.

She’s the Best is trying to capture both.

• How Jordan Roth Went From Tony-Winning Producer to Performance Artist

• Teenagers Are Buying Into the Tradwife Fantasy, Literally and Figuratively

• The Pitt’s Patrick Ball on Shipping, Stardom, and Season 3