Fourth album She's the Best finds the Australian popstar at his most vulnerable since 2020’s EP, In a Dream, revealing urges of yearning so debilitating he has to hold onto his imagination to bear it.

"To know you better / In order to call your name,” as Lily-Rose Depp sighs in French on the closing track, is perhaps the statement that best encapsulates the album, which may come as a surprise to anyone arriving here with expectations set by the two lead singles, “She’s the Best” and “Party”. Alongside the upfront "Canada Dry", these songs pick up where Something To Give Each Other left off, with fast BPMs and electro-pop accents that swirl into a frenzied haze of carefree nights out, hookups, and laughs with his girlfriends.

But on track four “I Do This For You”, another layer starts to come into view. Similar to the comedown after a party – which, incidentally, is how Sivan himself describes the album as a whole – the house song reveals the kind of melancholy that might make you revisit your own life choices. “Sorry for descending into some type of hysteria / I’m just a little lonely,” he admits, and the rest of She’s the Best follows suit from there.

While "Cowboy" and "Le Boy" conjure up picture-perfect future partners, "FF" and "Love So Big It Hurts" go the extra mile and run a whole relationship through the reel. Indeed, most of She’s the Best takes place in the popstar's mind. Connection, which was international and everywhere on Something To Give Each Other, is found here only scarcely, in scraps. We can have fun finding tandems for its tracks, though, like the chemsex anthem "Rush" viewed next to "Embarrassingly", where desire only finds release in masturbation.

Truthfully, Sivan's taste for longing never really went away, but it hasn't been as omnipresent on a record since his 2015 debut, . Speaking aloud his intimate thoughts, he lets us peer right through the cracks in his confidence and into the silence that falls after the party.

Amidst this sad tableau of lassitude, though, are glimmers of hope; the jazz-house "Troye Meets World" brings a much-needed moment of peace, and other forms of love peek through. He may be pining for romance but it's the platonic love of women and community that keep him afloat. It's a theme that we find in abundance lately, but maybe not yet in this way, where loved ones offer respite from outside threats (“We talk about the climate / How the boys are getting violent”). The women especially, fleshed out beyond simple muse status, help shape the songs, from the Madonna sample in "Party" to the Lily-Rose Depp letter of "Lost Time".

Letting us see slightly too much for comfort, Sivan has been posting on his socials with in-the-moment snapshots of his life and (over)explaining the meaning of the songs. But in that resides the key to She's the Best: an open yet unassuming declaration, unafraid of ridicule... if it's understood. More versatile than ever, he moves seamlessly between house, jazz, and electroclash, spoken word and singing. And although we can’t predict if what he's trying to manifest here will make his world less lorn, with such a strong will to create in unexpected way, Sivan remains the prince of modern pop.