Lost Time

Most albums about longing end by resolving it, or at least by pretending to. She's the Best ends by stepping outside the song. "Lost Time," the twelfth and final track, closes Troye Sivan's fourth album^[1] with a duet that is half music and half conversation, and with a guest who speaks rather than sings. It is an unusual way to finish a record, and the choice says a good deal about what the album has been circling all along.

The song is about wanting to take back the hours spent on everything except the person in front of you. It is also about the awkward discovery that a relationship may have sped ahead of the two people inside it. And it is about a small, hard-won consolation: that trying counts for something, even when the outcome stays open.

Where the song sits

Sivan released She's the Best on 9 October 2026, with "Lost Time (feat. Lily-Rose Depp)" listed as the closing track^[2][3]. Depp is the only guest on the album^[1]. That fact matters, because the record is otherwise a largely solitary portrait: a pop star in a hotel room, dreaming up a partner he has not yet met.

In interviews around the release, Sivan described the album as reflecting a lot of tension in his recent life, with ups and downs and moments of feeling both connected and disconnected^[2]. He has talked about how career success pushed him to withdraw and isolate, and how touring makes it hard to build relationships, especially early on^[2]. NPR's review of the album frames it similarly, noting that Sivan has said the 2024 Sweat Tour did not show the full picture of what he was going through at the end of his twenties^[5].

Against that background, a closing song about lost time reads almost like a thesis. The preceding eleven tracks catalogue what the nightlife and the touring cycle gave him, and what they cost. The last one asks what could have been done with those hours instead.

The central wish: time spent on the wrong things

Billboard's track-by-track ranking describes the song as built around a desire to reclaim lost time by putting love and connection ahead of the distractions of the outside world^[1]. That is a modest-sounding idea with a lot of weight behind it. For a performer whose working life is organized around schedules, flights and crowds, the distractions are not trivial. They are the job.

The song's emotional logic is that of someone who has just noticed how much of a life can be spent in motion. Time becomes a currency that has been spent without looking at the receipt. What the narrator seems to want is not a grand romantic gesture but the ordinary ability to be present, to turn down the noise and give attention to one person.

This lines up with the album's broader preoccupation with what Sivan has called manifestation: songs that function almost as invitations to a future partner^[2]. "Lost Time" is where that impulse turns from the future to the past. Instead of imagining the person who might arrive, it counts what was forfeited while waiting.

A relationship that moved too fast

Billboard also points to a thread in the song about a relationship that may have advanced before either person could fully understand what they were feeling^[1]. This is a familiar modern predicament. Attraction, intimacy and routine can arrive in a rush, especially for people whose lives are already accelerated, and the emotional understanding lags behind.

The song treats this without panic or blame. There is a sense of two people who were both caught up in momentum, each unsure how much of what they felt was real and how much was simply speed. The tone is closer to a shrug of recognition than to a grievance.

That restraint is part of the album's character. Reviewers have described She's the Best as a comedown after a night of euphoria, and the closing track is the sober morning-after conversation: less drama, more honest accounting.

An ending without resolution

According to Billboard, the song finishes without a neat resolution, settling instead on the comfort of having been willing to take the risk^[1]. The idea that trying is its own small victory runs against the usual pop instinct, which tends to want either a reunion or a clean break.

Leaving the question open suits an artist who has said he feels like an outsider in many of the spaces he moves through, and who has spoken about the pressures of turning thirty-one while friends settle down. In that light, ending on partial peace rather than victory feels truthful. The narrator has not been rewarded, but neither has he been wrecked. He has simply been brave, and he lets that be enough.

The French monologue

The most distinctive feature of the track is the spoken contribution from Lily-Rose Depp. Billboard notes that the closing track includes a spoken exchange in French between Sivan and Depp, and that it brings the album full circle^[1]. A Rolling Stone interview, as relayed secondhand by a news aggregator, reports that Sivan said Depp wrote the text in the studio and recorded it in two takes^[4]. I have not been able to confirm that detail against the original interview, so it is best treated with some caution.

Even so, the choice is telling. Language changes what intimacy sounds like. A passage in French, delivered in speech rather than song, lands as something overheard rather than performed, and that suits a song about presence over performance. The listener is no longer watching a pop star sing about connection. They are hearing two friends talk.

It also fits a pattern in how Sivan talks about his creative life. He has said he loves being in the orbit of the women he works with, naming Depp alongside Ariana Grande and Charli xcx, and the album's opening title track is framed as an ode to the women who have kept him grounded^[2]. Giving a woman the last word on the record is a consistent gesture, a bookend to the opener. The first track thanks the women in his life, and the final one lets one of them speak.

Sivan and Depp also share a history on screen, having both appeared in the HBO series The Idol, so the collaboration carries the ease of an existing friendship rather than the stiffness of a marketed feature.

Alternative readings

One reading takes the lost time to be about a specific person: a past partner with whom the narrator now wishes he had been more present. The song's sense of a relationship outrunning its participants supports this, as does the acceptance of an unresolved ending.

A second reading is more general and more autobiographical. The lost time belongs to the touring years, the party years, the stretch of his late twenties in which he was, by his own account, thrilled by his career but short on connection. On this view the song is addressed less to a lover than to a way of living, and the French voice is a kind of companion who arrives to say that the present is still available.

A third reading hears the song as an argument for friendship as much as romance. Because the album gives so much room to platonic love, with reviewers pointing to the friendship of women as a central subject, it is plausible that the time being mourned includes time not spent with friends. The spoken exchange would then be the point: a relationship sustained through conversation rather than desire.

These readings are not mutually exclusive, and the song's gentleness makes room for all three.

Why it resonates

Many listeners know the feeling of looking up from a busy stretch of life and realizing that months have disappeared. What distinguishes this song is that it does not turn the realization into a lecture or a catastrophe. It sounds like someone making a quiet decision.

It also arrives at a moment when pop is full of songs about indulgence and bravado, and this one ends the night differently. After an album of dancefloors, daydreams and imagined lovers, the final word goes to a conversation. That is a small formal gesture, but it changes how the whole record is remembered.

Conclusion

"Lost Time" is the album's exhale. It gathers the loneliness of the road, the speed of modern intimacy and the stubborn hope of the earlier tracks, and it declines to tie them up. What remains is the idea that attention is the one thing worth reclaiming, and that being willing to try is a legitimate place to end.

As a closer, it recasts everything before it. The party, the manifestation and the longing all turn out to be ways of asking the same question about how to spend the time that is left, and the answer arrives not as a chorus but as a voice speaking quietly in another language.