She's the Best

Most pop songs about admiration are aimed at one person and one feeling. She's the Best spreads its attention across a whole crowd. Troye Sivan opens his fourth album by speaking, not singing, about an unnamed young woman whose life is a pile of contradictions, and the effect is closer to a toast at a late-night kitchen table than a love song.

The track is a portrait, a thank-you note and a quiet confession at once. Its subject is never one individual, and that is the point.

Where the song comes from

The song is the title track and lead single of Sivan's album released on 9 October 2026 through Interscope^[6]. He co-wrote it with Jack Antonoff, Leland, Styalz Fuego and George Daniel, the drummer of The 1975 and Charli XCX's husband, and Charli herself appears on the outro hook^[1].

Sivan has said that writing it felt different from his usual process. By his account, it was the first time he was not psychoanalysing himself or writing about men^[3]. For an artist best known for songs of desire and heartbreak aimed at boys, that is a real change of subject.

He has described it as a love letter to the women in his life, among them Charli XCX, his sister, his mother, teachers and close friends^[2]. He has also framed it as a love letter to the feminine side of himself, something he says he resisted for a long time and now appreciates^[2].

A portrait built from vignettes

Rather than telling one story, the verses gather small scenes from a woman's days. She looks put together but is perpetually exhausted. She seems to be both a night owl and an early riser. She lives with her best friend, and the two occasionally share a lover. She knows her worth, can hold her own in an argument, and is looking forward rather than back^[1].

One scene has her sparring online with a bitter, hostile man, which gives the song a sliver of conflict and shows what she is up against. The details are funny and specific, and they treat chaos and inconsistency as strengths rather than flaws^[1].

The approach is a kind of affectionate collage. Nobody in the song is perfect, and the narrator does not pretend otherwise. Admiration here comes from noticing: the tiredness behind the polish, the loyalty inside a messy household, the stubbornness that survives a bad day.

Why he speaks instead of sings

The most striking choice is the delivery. Sivan has explained that a sweet melody carrying a sweet message gave him the ick, and that he wanted the song to feel sincere rather than patronising^[2]. Spoken word was the answer.

The deadpan narration makes the song feel like live commentary, as if he is describing events while they happen^[1]. The production is cloudy electropop, which keeps the mood hazy and nocturnal and lets the words stay in front^[1].

There is a real risk in a man praising women in a pop song, namely that it curdles into flattery or performance. Flattening his voice and letting the details do the work is how Sivan avoids that. The humour acts as a safeguard, because jokes are harder to fake than tributes.

Voice matters here more than usual. Sivan built his career on a smooth, breathy tenor and on choruses designed to stick. Here he withholds all of that, and the restraint tells the listener that the subject matters more than the singer.

The arrangement supports this by staying out of the way. It shimmers and drifts rather than driving, so that each new vignette arrives like a camera panning across a crowded room. The effect is intimate without being confessional, since the narrator is mostly watching.

Safety, community and the feminine

Underneath the playfulness is a serious claim. Sivan says women have been a source of safety, inspiration and empowerment in his life, especially at times when he did not feel safe or protected by men^[2]. The song reads differently with that in mind: it is gratitude from someone who found refuge in a particular kind of company.

The music video makes this community explicit. Nicole Kidman appears alongside Sivan, and RuPaul's Drag Race winner Sasha Colby has a cameo. The narration plays over a collage of women performing, including drag queens and stage performers, and Sivan himself appears in drag near the end^[3]. Reviewers have read the song as a tribute to trans women, drag queens and feminine-presenting people as well as women in the narrower sense^[3].

That widens the song's meaning. The women he celebrates are not an abstraction, and femininity here includes the nightlife and queer spaces where Sivan has always felt most at home.

There is also a lineage worth noting. Pop music has a long tradition of men borrowing from women's styles, voices and fashion while giving little back. Sivan's tribute reads as an attempt to name the debt directly, crediting the women and feminine people who shaped his sense of performance, confidence and style.

His own history with the subject is long. He has spoken of collaborating with Ariana Grande and Lily-Rose Depp and of touring with Charli XCX, and he calls women and feminine people the constant in his life^[3]. Having Charli sing the closing hook turns that friendship into part of the record's structure.

The album around it

Placed first on the record, the song works as a thesis about gratitude before the album turns toward longing. Sivan has described the project as an attempt to acknowledge the tension in his life, the gap between a confident, hyper-empowered stage persona and the isolation of a hotel room afterward^[2][5].

He was 31 as he made it, feeling the weight of milestones as friends settled down, and many of the songs are manifestations aimed at a partner he hopes to meet^[4][5]. Most of the album was recorded at home in Los Angeles with his brother Tyde Levi, with extra sessions in New York with Jack Antonoff^[4].

Seen this way, the opener is a declaration of what already sustains him. Before the yearning begins, he lists what he has: a circle of women who are funny, tired, fierce and loyal.

Other ways to hear it

One reading takes the title at face value, as a sincere tribute. Another notices the ironic edge of the spoken delivery and hears a self-aware joke about how male pop stars are expected to praise women. Both can be true at once, and the song's tone seems built to hold them together.

A third reading is more personal. If the song is also a love letter to the feminine side of himself, then the unnamed woman is partly a mirror, and the praise is partly self-acceptance^[2]. That would explain why the portrait feels so tender and so unguarded.

A fourth angle is the song's relationship to the album's loneliness. The woman in the song has a house full of friends, a rival online and a future to chase, which is exactly the busy, connected life that the later tracks suggest Sivan sometimes misses on the road^[5]. Read this way, the opener is both a celebration and a quiet admission of what he envies.

The video's setting reinforces that duality. It plays over a collage of performers, with Sivan performing at a club while Kidman watches, and the choice to pair him with Kidman, a screen icon of an older generation, frames the tribute as something that crosses eras as well as identities^[3].

Taken together, these readings suggest a song that is less a statement than a gesture, a way of turning toward the people who made the artist and saying so plainly. Listeners who have their own circle of women, friends or chosen family tend to hear it as a mirror of their own gratitude.

It is worth remembering how unusual this opening is for a record that goes on to explore heartbreak and want. Many albums announce themselves with a hook or a confession. This one begins with a stranger's morning routine, spoken in a calm voice, and trusts that the listener will lean in.

Why it lands

Pop has no shortage of songs that call someone the best, usually in the first flush of romance. This one earns the claim by being specific and a little unflattering, and by refusing to resolve its subject into a single person.

It also arrives at a moment when Sivan is openly asking what kind of pop star he wants to be. He has said he wanted the record to feel like a real person rather than a product^[2]. An opening track that trades hooks for conversation fits that goal.

The result is a song about friendship and chosen family that sounds like a voice memo to people who have carried him. It is modest in scale and generous in spirit, and it sets up the rest of the album by showing what he is grateful for before he admits what he is missing.