Troye Sivan’s She’s the Best: Why Critics Can’t Agree on Pop’s Most Stylish Album of the Fall

In August, Troye Sivan went on the podcast Las Culturistas and admitted something most pop stars would rather take to the grave: he is not especially good at singing. He joked that he had “scammed the world,” then later clarified that he considers himself a good talk-singer. Two months on, She’s the Best has arrived. The joke turns out to be the thesis. This is an album that is spoken, posed, filmed and styled as much as it is sung. Whether that makes it Sivan’s best record or his most beautiful moodboard depends entirely on which critic you ask.

The facts before the feelings

She’s the Best was released on October 9, 2026, through Interscope. It is his fourth studio album and the follow-up to Something to Give Each Other from 2023, the record that gave the world “Rush” plus a summer of sweaty club videos. According to NME and Paste, Jack Antonoff and George Daniel of The 1975 worked on the project. The title track arrived as the lead single with a video starring Nicole Kidman, directed by Gordon von Steiner.

The second single, “Party,” is built on a sample of Madonna’s 2000 hit “Music.” Stereogum reported that Sivan co-produced it with Styalz Fuego, Tyde Levi and Rob UFO, while the video opens on a muddy medieval battlefield narrated by Ian McKellen before relocating to a castle party. Elsewhere on the record, Lily-Rose Depp delivers a French spoken intro on the closer “Lost Time.”

If you follow fashion more closely than the charts, you may already have heard “Party” without knowing it. Dazed reported that the track played on loop at Valentino’s Spring/Summer 2027 show in Paris. For a song about the sacredness of a dance floor, a runway soundtrack is a fitting debut. For an album that wants to be “watched as much as listened to,” as Rolling Stone Australia quoted Sivan, it is practically a business plan.

Talk-singing has a long and fabulous history

Before you file the spoken delivery under laziness, a short history lesson. Talk-singing is a respectable tradition with a German name (Sprechgesang) plus a long list of icons. Rex Harrison talk-sang his way through My Fair Lady and won an Oscar for it. Lou Reed built half a career on deadpan narration. musicOMH hears him in the title track. Madonna, whose ghost haunts “Party,” whispered and purred across her 1992 album Erotica, another record NME names as a reference point next to Air’s “Sexy Boy” from 1998.

So Sivan is not cheating. He is choosing a register that puts attitude ahead of vocal acrobatics. The question critics are fighting about is whether the attitude carries the songs.

Why the critics are split down the middle

At the time of writing, the album holds a Metacritic score of 82 based on nine reviews, which the site labels universal acclaim. That number hides a genuine argument.

On the enthusiastic side, Rolling Stone Australia calls it the star’s best record yet, describing a party with “softer edges” that makes him feel more human. musicOMH gives it four out of five stars and praises the balance between sensuality and a longing for domestic bliss. NME’s Nick Levine finds it loose and laid-back, an intriguing mood piece rather than a crowd-pleaser. He notes that Sivan wanted it to feel more “sloppy” than its polished predecessor.

Paste delivers the sharpest dissent with a C+. Critic Sam Rosenberg argues that Sivan’s ambition outpaces his grasp and describes the album as more “a stylish moodboard” than a record to sit with. He singles out the title track’s spoken delivery as try-hard and the second half as heavy with ballads. Even the track picks clash. Paste and musicOMH both name “Le Boy” as a highlight, then part ways on “Canada Dry,” which Paste enjoys and musicOMH finds strangely stagnant. Pop criticism, it turns out, is just as unanimous as a fashion week trend report.

The moodboard question

This is the moment a fashion magazine gets to be useful. “Moodboard” is meant as an insult in Paste’s review, but in fashion it is how almost every collection begins. The modern pop album has become a similar object: a single, a short film, a runway placement, a cover star, a podcast confession and a set of reference points that fans can decode online. Rolling Stone Australia reports that the album came with a “thesis” rather than a traditional press release and that the visual world includes Kidman, drag star Sasha Colby and cover star Anna Bloda.

Rolling Stone Australia describes the record partly as a platonic love letter to the women, trans women and drag queens who shaped Sivan and links the title to that tribute. That framing also explains why the project feels designed around images and personas. You are not only meant to hear these songs. You are meant to recognise the references, the way you might spot a 1990s Helmut Lang silhouette on a new runway.

Is that a weakness? Our view: it is a risk rather than a flaw. An album that leans on aesthetics lives or dies by whether the songs still work when the visuals are switched off. Most of the critics we read say they do. Paste says they do not. You now have enough information to settle it yourself, ideally with headphones and the lights low.

What it means for pop

The interesting thing about She’s the Best is not whether it outsells “Rush.” It is how openly it embraces the idea that a pop star in 2026 is a creative director first and a vocalist second. Sivan said the quiet part out loud on a podcast and then built an album around it. Expect more artists to follow, partly because talk-singing, cinematic videos and fashion week placements are easier to scale than a five-octave range. Whether audiences reward that honesty over the long term is an open question. For now, the runway has already voted.