Troye Sivan strips himself bare on the yearning She’s the Best

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" c...