‘She’s the Best’ is what happens once the lights come up. Where last album, ‘Something to Give Each Other’, was built for maximum euphoria, this one is the comedown: a record about chasing someone who still hasn’t shown up. The one constant isn’t Troye, or his aspirational partner, it’s the women. The title track, an ode to the ones who’ve stuck around while boys and jobs came and went, is the clearest, most settled thing here. cast as “that girl,” in the backing vocals, the one moment where Sivan isn’t searching for anything.
‘Party’ sits close behind it, less personal tribute than near-ritual affirmation of partying itself, a message that carries real weight in queer culture specifically, built on a sample and barely any lyric beyond the word repeated, yet still one of the most electrifying tracks here. Everywhere past that, he’s searching, yearning. ‘I Do This For You’ is where it gets named outright with a chorus dedicated flatly to “whoever you are,” and built from a deliberately obscure sample rather than another crowd-pleasing grab. It breaks down mid-track into a bridge stitched from pop-up ads; an ugly, accurate picture of post-tour, app-mediated loneliness.
‘Embarrassingly’, nostalgic enough to date itself by an iPhone 6S, is one of the rare moments where the record’s acoustic and glitchy instincts actually fuse rather than just sitting side by side. And ‘Le Boy’, the most purely thrilling thing here sonically, turns a search for someone unmet into near-certainty by its final lines, as if the stranger was fated long before the song started.
Sonically, this is the sharper break from ‘Something to Give Each Other’, which ran almost entirely on one pulse: a dance-pop drive built for arenas. ‘She’s the Best’ touches that register, but only in moments. ‘Canada Dry’ and ‘Party’ gesture at it, but the acoustic hush of ‘Cowboy’, the breakbeat nostalgia of ‘Embarrassingly’ and the sample-collage chaos of ‘I Do This For You’ actively avoid it. It reads less like a new sound chosen than an artist tired of being expected to move the room at the same tempo every time.
None of that whiplash reads as sloppiness. It’s the structural choice an aftermath record should make, wanting the highs to still belong to him even once parading himself around stops meaning much. Self-reflection tips into something close to mania, closing not on resolution but ultimately on the same anticipation the record began with.
What it isn’t, deliberately, is tight. Sivan wanted something that felt “random, off the cuff” rather than perfect pop, and pulled in a wide cast to get there, Leland co-writing across the whole thing, bringing his usual loose, feel-over-precision instincts elsewhere. ‘She’s The Best’ is harder to sell in one sentence than its predecessor, and exactly what a new chapter should sound like; less interested in being loved instantly than lived with, for its lows as much as its highs.
8/10