Troye Sivan has put out Party, the second single from She's the Best, and the video attached to it opens on a muddy medieval battlefield with Sir Ian McKellen narrating. Gordon von Steiner directed. The song itself is built on a prominent sample of Madonna's 2000 single Music, which is a lot of weight for one three-minute record to carry.
The McKellen casting is not a stunt pulled out of nowhere. Sivan acted alongside him at fourteen, in a 2010 production of Waiting for Godot, which is more than half his life ago. Getting him back for a voiceover is a favour called in rather than a booking.
What follows the battlefield is less solemn. Sivan plays a knight who returns to his castle and walks into a heavily choreographed party, shot with enough on-screen activity that Stereogum warned readers about watching it at work. The look is baroque and deliberately over the top, and it moves.
Sivan's own account of the song is about how dance records behave in different rooms. "Dance music sounds very different on a dance floor than it does coming out of your laptop speaker," he said in press materials, describing the repetition as close to hypnotic and saying he wanted to play with structure on those terms.
She's the Best is his fourth album and his first since Something to Give Each Other in 2023. He announced it last month with the title track, whose video also ran on a famous face: Nicole Kidman, his co-star from Boy Erased. Two singles in, the campaign has leaned on actors as hard as on features.
Our own coverage has tracked the album since he revealed it for 9 October and announced it with the Kidman video. The release date sits on the release calendar with the rest of the autumn pop schedule.
The facts
- Troye Sivan released Party, the second single from She's the Best.
- The song samples Madonna's 2000 single Music.
- Gordon von Steiner directed the video, which casts Sivan as a medieval knight.
- Sir Ian McKellen provides the voiceover.
- Sivan acted alongside McKellen in a 2010 production of Waiting for Godot, aged fourteen.
- She's the Best is out on 9 October and is his fourth album.
- It follows Something to Give Each Other from 2023.
- Nicole Kidman appeared in the video for the title track.
How this checks out
Confirmed
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Independent outlets reported it separately, enough to treat it as confirmed.
Cited sources 3
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