‘She’s the Best’: Gay Album Is Gay
Album Review ★ Hadley Balser ★ @hadleybalseronpitch ★ 3 Minutes
Troye Sivan’s fourth album She’s the Best is an exploration of life and love through a queer man’s lens. As someone who was only a Sivan fan on the periphery until 2023’s Something to Give Each Other, I find the album to be an interesting connection between Sivan’s past work and more recent work.
A lot of this album seems to be deeply, earnestly honest. Putting aside tracks like “Canda Dry” and “Party” (both bops), this album is grounded. Where Something To Give Each Other was extravagant, loud, and fun, this album takes us back to songs like “What A Heavenly Way to Die” or “HEAVEN” from Sivan’s early discography.
One of my favorites upon a return to the album is “I Do This For You.” The danceable track has a layer of melancholy, one that Sivan acknowledges as a theme of the project. A lot of She’s the Best is about how Sivan experiences love as a single queer man.
Not everyone liked the album, though. Apparently, music made by a gay man about a gay man being gay is isolating for some audiences.
In a critique of She’s the Best, Sivan was accused of being “too gay.” Referencing the promotion of his “FF” music video, the post states, “his entire brand being the fact that he’s gay is so exhausting.”
Sivan reposted this on his Instagram story with a comment that says, simply, “I am gay!!!! Gay gay gay gay.”
Other than being objectively hilarious, the fact that this response is still necessary is, when examined further, genuinely infuriating. How dare someone call Troye Sivan, someone who was publicly queer in 2013, “too gay?” How could someone call him, and by extension, his debut album Blue Neighborhood, “too gay?”
Blue Neighborhood introduced an idea to me: maybe queerness could be about suffering, or maybe you could choose to make it about something different. Songs like “HEAVEN” were some of the first times I’d ever heard something like that voiced out loud. It follows, then, that Sivan’s latest album would also be about being a gay man falling in and out of love with boys and with life (see: “Cowboy” and “Troye Meets World”). Let me ask this: what would these critics prefer he write about?
If you think the answer isn’t “straightness,” you are wrong. Being gay is not Troye Sivan’s brand; it is who he is, and how he experiences the world. That’s not something that can be stripped from his work, not if he’s making music that means something.
Everything about She’s the Best is queer, especially, I would argue, the title track. As a single, “She’s the Best” was not my favorite. In context, however, the premise of the song is a truly enlightening, queer message of joy and community. I find it incredibly genuine and sweet that he wrote this song about the women in his life.
Community is one of the most important facets of queerness. As long as people call queer artists “too gay,” queer people will continue to need this kind of love and community. For Sivan, that community is the women in his life.
Songs like “Sex Star” feel like a continuation of this idea: boys let you down, but girls are forever. “Sex Star” is the incredibly relatable idea of never being as good or as sexy as a fantasy version of you could be. It’s a continuation of everything that “One of Your Girls” is: knowing you are not enough for someone as you are.
If “Sex Star” is vulnerability, “Troye Meets World” is ultimate joy. Here, the tempo and energy pick back up. It feels like a beat of hope and happiness for Sivan in the midst of what can only be classified as gay yearning. “Le Boy” seconds this feeling, though with a helping of longing alongside the volume that could burst your eardrums (but in a fun way)! One especially notable part of the song is the softening, quiet outro to “I was born in love with you.” Sivan’s gay yearning has another peak at “Cowboy,” a song that functions as both sweet and singalong.
Listening to the album, it makes me angry that anyone could hear this and think it’s not worth writing about. Queer love, loss, and joy are complex and rich, and inspire wonderful art. One thing is clear, though. If She’s the Best is anything, it is fully, unapologetically queer.
