Press play on Troye Sivan‘s new “Party” video and the first voice you hear belongs to Sir Ian McKellen, a voice half the internet promptly compared to Gandalf’s. That choice is the key to the whole clip, which turns a banger about a long night out into an argument that dancing is where many queer people first feel free.
“Party” came out on 17 September 2026 as the second single from She’s the Best, Sivan’s fourth studio album, out on 9 October 2026. It’s streaming in Singapore now, so the soundtrack for your next Friday night is sorted, and the album lands on 9 October.
A Decade of Dance Floor Credentials
If you only know Sivan from a TikTok sound, here’s the short version. The Melbourne-raised singer has spent more than a decade moving between music, fashion and film. His catalogue has passed 15.5 billion global streams, and he has picked up nine Billboard Hot 100 entries, three GRAMMY® nominations and eight ARIA Awards (the Australian Recording Industry Association’s music honours, Australia’s version of the Grammys).
His last album, Something to Give Each Other, debuted in the Top 5 of the Billboard 200 and at No. 1 on Billboard’s Dance/Electronic Albums chart. It gave us “Rush”, “One of Your Girls” and “Got Me Started”, then ended with the SWEAT Tour alongside Charli xcx. When we covered that album in 2023, we called it an addictive mix of lust, pain and ecstasy built for the dance floor. “Party” suggests he has no plans to leave that dance floor anytime soon.
A Madonna Hook and a Housemate
The song grew out of the bush doofs Sivan went to growing up in Melbourne. These are Australian outdoor dance parties held out in the bush. He wanted to recreate a weekend that drifts from one venue to the next with no clear start or finish. “Dance music sounds very different on a dance floor than it does coming out of your laptop speaker,” he says. “The repetition becomes almost hypnotic, and I wanted to play with structure in that way.”
Running through the track is a sample of Madonna’s “Music”, her 2000 hit that topped the US charts. That makes the song instantly recognisable to anyone who has danced at a queer club night in the past two decades. The credits list Luka Kloser, Elvira Anderfjärd, Tove Burman, Leland, Rob Feher, Styalz Fuego and Tyde Levi, whose work appears on a Sivan release for the first time.
That last name matters more than it looks. “We’ve always made music in the same house. We’ve lived together for almost our whole lives,” Sivan says of Levi. “We’ve always naturally passed music back and forth.” After years of swapping tracks at home, one of those songs has finally made it into the official catalogue, which makes it one of the sweeter details in the release.
A Rave in an English Castle
The video comes from Gordon von Steiner, Sivan’s longtime collaborator, who also directed the Nicole Kidman-starring clip for “She’s the Best”. They filmed a lavish medieval period piece in a castle in Berkeley, England. It’s full of choreography, armour and a lot of bare-skinned revelry, and it lands closer to a costume drama that took a wrong turn into a warehouse rave than to a typical pop video.
The period setting is the whole thesis, not a gimmick. Sivan’s reasoning is that if letting loose is part of being human, then people must always have partied, so he and von Steiner went looking for what that looked like centuries ago. Their answer: “we went back in time and threw one.” It’s a funny line, and it doubles as the clearest summary of the video anyone is going to give.
Why the Dance Floor Feels Sacred
The serious part of the concept comes straight from Sivan. “Partying is actually quite sacred, especially for queer people,” he says. “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.”
That is the line to keep in mind for anyone who has ever been told that clubbing is a waste of time. For many young queer people, the first place they saw people like themselves was a dance floor, long before they saw that on a screen or found words for it. By setting that feeling in the Middle Ages, the video argues that it has always existed, even when nobody was allowed to write it down.
The McKellen Connection Goes Way Back
McKellen’s voice-over rests on history. The two first worked together in a production of Waiting for Godot in Perth when Sivan was 14, almost 15. At the time, Sivan was close to coming out to his mother, and seeing an openly gay man who was free, proud and successful left a lasting impression on him.
Years later, inviting McKellen to open “Party” is Sivan’s way of drawing a line between two generations of openly gay performers. The teenager who looked up to McKellen is now the pop star plenty of queer fans look up to themselves. That is the most moving part of the release, and it gives the voice-over far more weight than a celebrity cameo usually carries.
What Fans Are Saying
Online reaction has mostly focused on the visuals. Fans have called the video “absolutely mind-blowing” and praised its cinematography, costumes and choreography. Others have leaned into the Gandalf jokes about McKellen’s narration. The Madonna sample has been described as “iconic” and “a banger” by listeners who expect it to fill queer dance floors.
The praise isn’t unanimous. On Reddit, some listeners called the song dull or disliked the sample, while still admitting the dancers and visuals were outstanding. On balance, the video is the event here, and the song is likely to sound best in the setting Sivan wrote it for: loud, late and on a dance floor rather than through laptop speakers. At least that’s one point everyone seems to agree on.
Two Singles Into She’s the Best
“Party” follows the title track “She’s the Best”, which the release describes as exploring the feminine spirit and the people who have shaped Sivan’s life. This new single shifts the focus to the places where people go to lose themselves and, sometimes, find themselves. The two tracks released so far are a sampling of the range of pop styles on the album. After a Nicole Kidman video and a castle rave, it’s hard to guess what the remaining tracks will sound like, which is what makes 9 October worth waiting for.
If your idea of a sacred space involves strobe lights rather than stained glass, “Party” is worth your time: stream the single here, watch the castle-set video by Gordon von Steiner (McKellen’s opening is worth hearing with headphones), and pre-order or pre-save She’s the Best ahead of its release on 9 October 2026. See you on the dance floor!
Photos by Marcus Cooper and Kai Gillespie, courtesy of Universal Music Singapore.
Read us first on Google: add DANAMIC as a preferred source and our stories show up more in your Top Stories and AI results.
