Troye Sivan’s New Album Is a Reminder That Confidence and Longing Can Coexist

Troye Sivan just dropped his fourth album, She’s the Best, and if the title alone doesn’t make you want to strut into your Monday like you own it, wait until you hear what’s actually underneath all that glam.

The album arrived on October 9, wrapped in cabaret shimmer and New York City nightlife energy — teasers of rockabilly hair, an overground subway platform on the cover, a title track featuring Charli XCX and, somehow, Nicole Kidman. On the surface, it’s pure confidence. It’s the kind of record that sounds like it already knows how good it looks.

But here’s the part that actually got me, past the vinyl variants and the fashion-editorial rollout: Sivan has said the record holds “really high highs” sitting right on top of “this deep sense of longing.” The brightest, most danceable moments on the album aren’t covering up the ache underneath. They’re built on it. He’s not choosing between glittering and aching. He’s doing both, sometimes in the same line.

You don’t have to pick a lane

We talk about confidence like it’s a finished state — like one day you arrive, and after that you just are confident, fully, all the time, no cracks showing. That’s not how it works for anyone, famous or not. The people who seem the most sure of themselves have usually just gotten better at holding both things at once, the high and the longing, instead of waiting for one to cancel out the other.

Sivan has talked about one of his favorite unreleased tracks being about “the attempts to mould and change myself to make myself more appealing.” That’s a specific, honest thing to admit on a record that’s supposed to be a victory lap. Most of us have done some version of that: softened an opinion, tweaked a personality trait, performed a version of ourselves we thought would be easier to love. The move isn’t pretending you never did it. It’s noticing it, naming it, and deciding what you actually want to keep.

Let the party and the ache share a room

There’s something freeing about an artist putting “She’s the Best” on the cover while the songs underneath are quietly about missing being loved a certain way. It gives the rest of us permission to stop editing our own contradictions down to something tidier. You can be genuinely proud of how far you’ve come this year and still wish certain people had stuck around. You can post the confident photo and still be figuring out who you are underneath it. Neither one cancels the other out. Neither one is the lie.

Sivan says his goal is “always to be super honest,” and honestly, that might be the whole trick. Not performing a certainty you don’t feel, and not performing sadness to seem deep, either. Just letting however you actually feel take up space, even when it’s two things at once that don’t seem to match.

So if today you’re somewhere between feeling like the best and feeling a little bit of that longing underneath, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re just being honest about having a full, complicated, interesting inner life. That’s not a contradiction to fix. It’s just what being a person, or writing a genuinely great pop album, actually sounds like.