"The Good Side" by Troye Sivan // Song Review

- September 08, 2025

"The Good Side" stands out as one of the most heartfelt and introspective moments in Troye Sivan's entire discography. Released as a part of his 2018 sophomore album Bloom, the track is a beautiful reflection on the aftermath of a breakup, but not necessarily from the perspective of heartbreak, but from the complicated view point of someone who was able to walk away from that relationship relatively unscathed emotionally.

In an interview with Zane Lowe on Beats 1 Troye said, "This song's a little rough. It's basically about a breakup that I went through a while ago. You know, in a breakup, I think just the sheer nature of it, is that someone is going to get it rough. And I happened to be on the good side of things..."

"I got the good side of things, left you with both of the rings," Troye sings in the opening verse. "My fingers danced and swayed in the breeze, the change in the wind took you down to your knees, I got the good side of you".

He continued in his interview with Zane Lowe, "It's sort of a letter to that person to express apologies and sympathy and if I could change this at all, I would've. So I'm hoping that this song, a couple years down the line, is going to serve as a cathartic experience for the both of us to be like, 'look, this is the way that things happened and whenever we're ready to move on, let's do that.'"

"I got the good side of you, send it out into the blue, the people danced to the sound of your heart, the world sang along to it falling apart" is such a beautiful lyric. It captures the specificity of the situation and the way he was able to turn this experience into something both impactful and enduring. Through his music, he shared that story with the world.

"My last album was called Blue Neighbourhood," Troye said in a 2018 interview with Genius breaking down every lyric of the song. "I wrote a little bit about this breakup as it was happening, as I was going through all of the emotions that sort of led to the breakup. This super surreal experience of me being out on stage and singing these songs about something so personal and current. It was being sang right back at me with these big smiles and people dancing and stuff. For me, it was a really healing experience, but it was also super, super strange. Know that I haven't just gone and ran off and completely forgotten about you. And I recognize that I'm getting to do all this stuff, and it's probably easier for me than it is for you. And I apologize. I wish that this wasn't the way things were going down."

It is sung as a heartfelt reflection back on that time in his life and all of the ways he was shaped by this relationship, now with the privilege of seeing it all so much clearer now in hindsight. Even if it didn't last forever, "The Good Side" is a profound and bittersweet acknowledgement of what once was.

"That relationship—I learned so much that it set me up for the rest of my life," Troye continued in his interview with Genius. "Every relationship, even if it's not the perfect one that lasts forever, every time you learn so much about yourself, and about relationships, and about love, and you grow."