Troye Sivan takes on the gay male loneliness epidemic

Three years ago, Troye Sivan gifted the gays “Rush”—a dance-floor thumper that became an instant in-community classic. With “Rush” and the album that followed, 2023’s critically beloved Something to Give Each Other, Sivan levelled up to a new plane of pop stardom that included his first Grammy nomination, a Saturday Night Live parody and a co-headlining tour with Charli XCX amidst the brat phenomenon.

The Sweat tour was a rager that left arena floors across North America sticky with a coat of vodka and glitter. Thousands thrashed along with Sivan as he performed “Rush” and “Got Me Started,” but, as the pop star has revealed in recent interviews, he would return to his hotel room after shows and feel a deep sense of longing and loneliness. That experience informs the mood of Sivan’s new album, She’s the Best. The pensive, introspective record mostly hovers around the mid tempo, unlike “Rush” or the album’s pulsating single, “Party.” The sound of “Party,” it turns out, was a red herring; listening to She’s the Best feels less like a great night out at the club than it does wandering around an expensive hotel at three o’clock in the morning. 

Sivan is often lustful on She’s the Best, but the album’s most impactful moments come from his meditations on isolation rather than his expressions of more carnal desires. In that way, Sivan is not so different from his compatriots in the gay club. The dance floor can be a deeply transformative and even revolutionary space, but if you spend too long in the club, it’s easy to get lost in the night. It’s easy to feel isolated within gay male culture at large; even gay men with slammed social calendars and frequent hookups can wind up starved for deep connection. By chronicling Sivan’s fruitless search for a long-term partner and subsequent loneliness, She’s the Best achieves what great pop music is supposed to: it reflects culture back to us.

Research from the Canadian Men’s Health Foundation confirms that the oft-discussed male loneliness epidemic is real; half of Canadian men are now at risk of social isolation, which is a major factor in the declining mental health of men. That study echoes research from elsewhere, including a Gallup poll that found one in four men under 35 living in the U.S. report feeling lonely. (Sivan is 31.) And new research out of Sivan’s native Australia found that gay men face far higher levels of loneliness than their heterosexual peers.

There are myriad reasons why gay men at large face loneliness, ranging from discrimination to the prevalence of hookup culture, but Sivan’s answer on She’s the Best is simple: he’s lonely because he doesn’t have a boyfriend. 

That’s not to say he’s not having sex. This is without question Sivan’s horniest project. On “Sex Star,” Sivan describes himself as being “hard and impatient” waiting for a man. “Cowboy” details a booty call from a man who’s dirty behind closed doors, leaving Sivan’s “knees getting blue on the floor.” And “Canada Dry” is about wanting to sip a sexy man dry.

But the moments when Sivan’s sexual desires are met on She’s the Best rarely feel fully satisfying in the context of the story being told across the album. The pop star’s love languages, it would seem, include not only physical touch but also quality time. She’s the Best is full of earnest yearning for a deep and sustained connection that goes beyond a single night with a handsome stranger, however impactful that night might be. “Le Boy,” for instance, is a love song written for a partner Sivan hasn’t met yet; an imagined man who will take drives with him and go swimming and hang out at cafés. And on “FF,” Sivan shares bits of his early life with a hypothetical man, showing him his childhood home and talking about his fears for the planet. But his attempts to sing or sleep his way into long-term love are fruitless, leaving longing as the top note of the album.

The experience of feeling lonely, then finding someone to have sex with only to feel lonelier when it’s over, is certainly not the exclusive domain of famous pop stars. Research published in the Journal of Homosexuality found that gay men often use sex as a means of managing loneliness, only to discover that temporary intimacy actually deepened their feelings of isolation. The despondence that results is felt across She’s the Best, from the distorted, almost paranoid, sound of “Le Boy” to the hint of pain in Sivan’s voice when he mimics a dating service on “I Do This for You,” singing, “Find hot singles in the Los Angeles area.” That’s not to say She’s the Best is a downer. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite: despite his feelings of isolation, Sivan remains a hopeful romantic who believes the love he’s after is real and out there waiting for him.

One might imagine someone in Sivan’s shoes would have an abundance of worthy romantic suitors. The singer is, by his own declaration, not only famous but also wealthy and well endowed. One of the album’s few truly clumsy moments is a line on “I Do This for You” that reads like a bad Grindr bio: “I’m rich, big dick, the shit, I’m it.” Sivan is also thin, white and marketably attractive. Drop him in any major city with a phone and a free afternoon and he could have a man over within the hour. But being famous presents its own unique challenges, like strangers discussing your so-called “twink death” on the internet, including a plastic surgeon who went viral for suggesting all the procedures he thought Sivan should undergo in order to conceal any sign of aging.

In a Cultured magazine cover story last month, Sivan laid out how isolating it has been trying to date, as he puts it, “other gay guys who also happen to be the demographic that listens to [his] music.” On his press tour to promote She’s the Best, Sivan has been candid about his life, a skill that helped him gain prominence as a teenage YouTuber in the 2010s prior to his rise as an actor and singer. On record, that vulnerability serves as his signature—he’s honest even when his revelations might be embarrassing. On “Sex Star,” for example, he rattles off his superficial attempts to shore up value in the sexual marketplace (“got a fake tan and a trainer”), proving perceived desirability doesn’t necessarily equate to confidence.

Nor does proximity to people necessarily equate to a sense of connection. As Madonna, whose 2000 hit “Music” Sivan samples on “Party,” once sang: “I found myself in crowded rooms, feeling so alone.” It would surely not surprise Madonna to learn Sivan felt so alone during the Sweat tour. With his ascension to the rarified category of true blue pop stardom, Sivan has joined a small club who all understand how lonely it can be at the top—even for a vers. His tribute to Madonna with “Party,” however, may provide a clue to where to find deep meaning while waiting on the man he’s manifesting to materialize in the flesh. The song’s spotlighting of Madge’s mid-career for those who may not know it, like the queers on dance floors who were not yet born when it topped the charts in 2000, is part of an underdeveloped thematic strain of She’s the Best: Sivan’s love of women.

Though Sivan spends much of She’s the Best lusting after and pining for men, the album’s title track is about his adoration of female characters. The song’s video stars Nicole Kidman, with whom Sivan filmed a movie called Boy Erased when he was just 18, and drag icon Sasha Colby. It’s also meant to, he has explained, serve as a tribute to the women in his life, from his mom and sister, to one of his English teachers in school, his childhood friends and Charli XCX, who provides a quick vocal on the song’s outro. In promoting this record, Sivan has spoken lovingly about the influence women have had on him and, unlike many of his pop-star peers, he actually worked with women on this project, including Elvira Anderfjärd, Luka Kloser, Lucy Healey, Madison Love and Allie X. As a title and organizing principle, however, Sivan’s love of women doesn’t quite hold up as a framework for the rest of the album.

But maybe it could serve as an answer to some of his yearning. If manifestation has any power at all, She’s the Best will bring Sivan a man. But the album also documents how he already has something just as valuable: the love of good women. Because yes, being any type of queer person can be lonely, and gay men have their own unique forms of isolation. But most of us also have great women in our lives. And it’s hard to be lonely when a smart and charismatic woman is nearby. In the amplified pop-star terms of Sivan’s life, he’s surrounded by Charli XCX, Dua Lipa and Addison Rae. The rest of us have less famous, but just as powerful, women to lift us up. And they really are the best.