She's the Best

“She’s the Best” opens Troye Sivan’s next era by taking away the thing his fans came for: the voice. Where “Rush” sold itself on falsetto and physical urgency, the title track and lead single from his fourth album — out October 9 on Interscope, his first release since leaving EMI/Capitol — sits Sivan almost entirely in a flat, talk-sung register over a psychedelia-inflected trip-hop beat that barely leaves two chords for four minutes. It is, by design, one of the least showy things he has ever put his name on.

What it’s flat about is a love song with nowhere obvious to put itself: an adoring, detail-by-detail portrait of an unnamed woman, catalogued the way a besotted friend narrates someone’s whole personality back to them — the way she laughs, the way she holds a room, the specific, non-romantic ache of being a gay man in platonic orbit around a woman he’d clearly follow anywhere. Nicole Kidman and Sasha Colby turning up in the video, alongside Sivan’s own sister Sage, isn’t just stunt casting — it widens the “she” out from one person into a whole register of women Sivan is trying to render as mythic without romanticizing them into something they’re not. A hidden Charli XCX cameo on the track (unbilled, easy to miss on a first listen) does something similar in miniature: famous voices treated as texture, not marquee.

The monotone delivery is going to cost Sivan some listeners who wanted “Rush 2,” and it’s a fair complaint — there are stretches here that ask a lot of patience from a two-chord loop with no chorus doing the usual work of releasing tension. But the choice earns its keep more often than not, because the flatness is the argument: a hookless, undramatic vocal is what makes the devotion in the lyric read as sincere rather than performed, the pop equivalent of saying something true in a flat voice because saying it any other way would sound like you were selling it.

It’s a smaller, stranger single than a lead track usually gets to be, and it works better as a mood than as a hook-forward pop song — which will read as a flaw to anyone judging it against his own back catalog and as the point to anyone willing to sit with it. 7.2/10 — a genuine risk, mostly paid off, from an artist who didn’t need to take one.