Troye Sivan has gone full medieval for his new single Party, combining Madonna, Sir Ian McKellen and a castle full of queer revelry into one gloriously unexpected music video.
The Australian pop star’s latest track is the second taste of his upcoming album She’s the Best, following the title track released last month.
Party samples Madonna’s 2000 dancefloor classic Music and builds around the hypnotic repetition of a night that simply refuses to end.
Then there is the video.
Sivan appears in medieval armour before the battlefield gives way to an increasingly decadent celebration of dancing, desire and queer pleasure.
Think Rush meets Game of Thrones, only considerably hornier.
Sir Ian McKellen Opens The Party
The clip begins with the unmistakable voice of Sir Ian McKellen.
“What is victory if not celebrated?” he asks, before Sivan’s medieval world erupts into life.
McKellen’s involvement is more personal than a simple celebrity cameo.
Sivan first worked with the openly gay acting legend when he was 14, almost 15, during the 2010 Australian tour of Waiting for Godot.
Sivan has since spoken about how meaningful that encounter was.
At the time, he was approaching his own coming-out and said seeing an openly gay man enjoying an extraordinarily successful career gave him an example of what his own future might look like.
More than 15 years later, McKellen is now introducing a Troye Sivan music video about queer people partying through history.
Quite the full-circle moment.
Madonna Meets The Bush Doof
Musically, Party pulls from another queer pop institution: Madonna.
The song prominently samples her 2000 hit Music, while collaborators include Luka Kloser, Elvira Anderfjärd, Tove Burman, Leland, Rob Feher, Styalz Fuego and Sivan’s brother Tyde Levi.
It marks the first official musical release between Troye and Tyde.
Sivan says the track was partly inspired by the bush doofs he experienced growing up in Melbourne and the strange, cyclical feeling of a weekend spent moving between parties 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 said.
“The repetition becomes almost hypnotic, and I wanted to play with structure in that way.”
That sense of repetition drives the entire track.
It feels less like a conventional pop song and more like being several hours into a very good night and deciding, against all reasonable judgement, that nobody is going home yet.
‘Partying Is Actually Quite Sacred’
The video was directed by Gordon von Steiner and filmed at a castle in Berkeley, England.
For Sivan, the historical setting came from a conversation about why nightlife matters so much within queer culture.
“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,” he said.
“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 idea becomes the heart of the video.
Instead of treating queer nightlife as something distinctly modern, Sivan imagines what might happen if you took the same desire for community, freedom and release and dropped it centuries into the past.
“And if letting loose is innate to humanity, which I believe it is, then surely people have always partied,” he said.
“We wanted to know what that looked like. So we went back in time and threw one.”
A New Side Of She’s The Best
Party gives another glimpse at what Sivan has described as the two sides of his upcoming fourth album.
Some tracks are high-energy, explosive and built for the dancefloor.
Others are quieter and more inward-looking.
“There is this high-octane side to the album that feels really bombastic,” Sivan has said, “and then there are the songs that feel like the interior of my mind.”
“There’s this deep sense of longing. The album is a crazy journey.”
If Party represents the high-octane side, Sivan is clearly not easing anyone into it gently.
There is Madonna.
There is McKellen.
There are knights.
There is queer medieval debauchery.
And frankly, we have no notes.
She’s the Best is released on 9 October 2026.
