TROYE SIVAN MAKES A NIGHT OUT FEEL SACRED ON 'PARTY'
Image: Kai Gillespie.
There’s a point in a good night out when the clock stops mattering. One venue becomes another, the music gets louder and the outside world starts to disappear. That suspended feeling is where Troye Sivan finds Party - a pulsing new single that treats nightlife less like an escape and more like a ritual.
The track arrives with a suitably extravagant visual, directed by Gordon von Steiner and filmed in a castle in Berkeley, England. Instead of recreating a modern club, Sivan goes centuries backwards, staging an opulent celebration filled with revelry and excess. The result is deliberately theatrical, but the idea underneath it is surprisingly intimate: for many queer people, the party can be the place where they finally feel like they belong.
“When Gordon von Steiner and I were talking about the video and the song, we kept coming back to the idea that partying is actually quite sacred, especially for queer people. Nightlife is often the first place a queer person finds themselves in a room where they're not the minority, so it becomes a really formative and liberating space for so many of us. And it letting loose is innate to humanity, which I believe it is, then surely people have always partied. We wanted to know what that looked like.. So we went back in time and threw one.”
That sense of release is built into the song itself. Party moves in cycles, deliberately resisting the conventional feeling of a song heading toward a neat conclusion. Its repetition is the point. Sivan drew on the bush doofs he experienced growing up in Melbourne, as well as the physical impact of hearing dance music in the environment it was made for. “Dance music sounds very different on a dance floor than it does coming out of your laptop speaker. The repetition becomes almost hypnotic, and I wanted to play with structure in that way.” says Sivan. A sample of Madonna’s iconic track Music adds another pulse to the track, while a sizeable creative team - Luka Kloser, Elvira Anderfjärd, Tove Burman, Leland, Tyde Levi, Rob Feher and Styalz Fuego - helps shape its club-ready momentum.
There’s also a personal full-circle moment hidden in the video. Sir Ian McKellen provides its opening voiceover, reconnecting with Sivan decades after they worked together on Waiting for Godot in Perth when Sivan was a teen. For the young Sivan, McKellen represented something significant: an openly gay man who appeared free, successful and unapologetic. His presence here gives the visual an understated thread of queer continuity.
Furthermore, the working with his brother Tyde Levi carries its own history. The pair have lived together for almost their entire lives and have long shared music privately. Party marks the first time that creative relationship has officially entered Sivan’s catalogue. “We've always made music in the same house. We've lived together for almost our whole lives,” says Sivan. “We've always naturally passed music back and forth.”
The single follows She’s the Best, the title track and first taste of Sivan’s fourth studio album, due October 9, 2026. If that first taste introduced a more personal exploration of femininity and influence, Party widens the lens to the communal experience - the places, people and nights that allow us to temporarily become someone else. Or perhaps, more accurately, become ourselves.
Party fittingly, doesn’t feel like an invitation to watch from the sidelines. It’s designed to pull you in, keep the beat going and make you forget what time it is.
She’s the Best is out October 9.
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