Troye Sivan’s ‘Party’ borrows Madonna’s ‘Music’ for a queer liberation anthem

The second single from Troye Sivan’s fourth studio album opens with Sir Ian McKellen’s voice in a stone corridor and ends with Sivan dancing in a medieval English castle. “Party” is built around an interpolation of Madonna’s “Music,” and the whole production turns on one idea: that queer people have always found each other in the dark, across centuries, and that something about that dynamic deserves an anthem.

The Madonna lift is not decorative. “Music” is one of pop’s most-recognized dancefloor anthems — a record made specifically for collective release, for the late night, for the space outside ordinary life. Sivan routes it through a statement about queer community. “Nightlife is often the first time that you find yourself in a space where you’re not the minority,” Sivan has said. The interpolation earns its place.

The production, by Styalz Fuego and Rob LFO alongside Sivan and his brother Tyde Levi, lands in a house-pop register. The Melbourne doof scene — outdoor raves where geography forces community that city clubs rarely replicate — runs through the track. Gordon von Steiner’s video makes the idea literal: Sivan plays a knight returning from battle to castle celebrations, his siblings appear among the revelers, and McKellen’s opening monologue frames the whole sequence as a meditation on queer lineage across time.

The medieval-castle conceit is cinematic but carries real risk. It could read as concept-album grandiosity from an artist still proving his reach beyond a core fanbase. The Madonna interpolation sharpens both possibilities: it is either the lift that gives “Party” crossover momentum, or a comparison that makes the gap between the two artists’ cultural gravity unusually visible. The track has accumulated more than 29,000 listeners in its first week — genuine traction — but streaming charts will show whether the queer-liberation argument travels beyond the community it speaks to directly.

Sivan’s previous record built a case that pop music could be organized entirely around queer identity without softening it for mainstream adjacency. “Party” extends that logic: the queer-lineage framing and the choice of a centuries-old setting suggest an artist arguing that this community’s need for space is not a contemporary condition but an enduring one. Whether the full album sustains that claim is the question this single leaves open.

“She’s the Best,” Sivan’s fourth studio album, arrives October 9 via Interscope Records.

The argument that queer nightlife is not new didn’t need a medieval castle to land. That Sivan built one anyway says something about what “She’s the Best” is trying to be.

Tags: music-en1, pop, Queer, Troye Sivan, house pop, Party