Who told you the party is over? Definitely not Troye Sivan. With his new single, you won’t be able to tell whether you’re dancing barefoot at a bush doof or showing off your moves on a dancefloor. Probably both. Party is the second release from his forthcoming album, She’s the Best, due out October 9. After listening to the second track and watching the music video, directed by his longtime collaborator Gordon von Steiner, you won’t be able to help counting down the days until you can discover what other surprises Sivan has up his sleeve.
It might sound familiar to millennial ears, as the track samples Madonna’s No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hit, Music. As for the chorus, it may sound repetitive, but never redundant. The beats of Party become absolutely hypnotic from the very first chords. Once you hear it, you’ll find yourself remembering the lyrics even while staring at the ceiling right before falling asleep. Actually, forget that: if the song gets stuck in your head at night, chances are you won’t be lying in bed for long. You’ll end up on the dancefloor. Rumour has it that this song wasn’t meant to play through your AirPods on your way to the office; it was born to be blasted through the kind of speakers that make the club’s walls tremble.
That was exactly the artist’s intention: something euphoric, an ode to losing yourself in a really good night out. Once again, Troye flips the negative connotations that partying tends to carry, arguing that letting loose is innate to humanity, even if, at times, an oppressive religious society has made us forget it. Perhaps a good night out is all it takes to reconnect with that instinct. And for Sivan, that freedom takes on an even deeper meaning within queer culture, where nightlife has long been a place to find community and the freedom to be yourself. As the artist himself puts it, “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.”
With that idea at its core, Sivan needed a music video that could bring the message to life. So, when it came to the concept and director, the safest bets were a period piece and Gordon von Steiner. Together, they travelled all the way to a castle in Berkeley, England, to recreate a world of revelry and carefree partying — basically the kind of attitude those medieval prudes might have embraced back in their day.
In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo had his Sam, and together they had Ian McKellen as their Gandalf. In this music video, Troye has both von Steiner and, for his Gandalf, he has—oops—Ian McKellen as well. Yes, you heard that right. We thought the surprises had reached their peak with his latest music video, She’s the Best, starring Nicole Kidman. But, of course, no one could have imagined that Troye would open his new release with the voice of Gandalf the White.
That last unexpected twist also adds a deeply personal touch to Sivan’s story: McKellen, whom he first worked with as a teenager, was a source of inspiration for Troye at a pivotal moment in his life, when he was on the cusp of coming out to his mother.