We come to this place… for controversy…
[Video]
[6.53]
[4]
Claire Davidson: I’ve long associated Troye Sivan with sultry, effervescent dance tracks — a niche he serves well, sure, but one that can only reap so many rewards in its inherent ephemerality. I found myself genuinely stunned, then, to hear that “She’s the Best” represents an entirely new mode for him: an expansive, dimensional spoken-word track whose gravitas is built around humid, reverb-cloaked guitars and raggedly distorted percussion. The song’s central guitar line is bright without being cloying, and Sivan and his producers do a phenomenal job of twisting that central melody into enough different contortions to keep the track dynamic: the song opens up with even more regal electric guitars on the second verse, and after the track breaks for a brief silent passage, the outro fully dissolves into giddy euphoria, driven primarily by a restless tempo shift. That evocative instrumentation does most of the track’s heavy lifting from an emotional standpoint: Sivan’s paean to a messy but tenacious club rat isn’t particularly novel (Charli XCX, the patron saint of this archetype, even supplies backing vocals here), but when paired with a soundscape that so vividly recreates the rapture of sweaty underground enclaves, even the lyrics’ most mundane details convey a sense of worship. I shouldn’t discount Sivan’s cleverness in sketching this portrait, either. It’s clear that, even if “She’s the Best” presents an amalgam of women he’s known, it’s a thorough one: only someone who truly loves this kind of high-octane hedonist could so affectionately note her tendency to start fights with incels online.
[8]
Callie Petch: Troye Sivan slides up next to me at a party dangling a bag of powder and asks, “hey, you want a version of ‘Nice for What’ freed from all that skeevy, cynical, pandering Drake-ness, with a little Lou Reed and The 1975 garnish sprinkled on top?” And I, as a mortal panromantic enby, am already halfway through snorting the bag clean by the time he finishes that query. Also, not that it should affect the score or anything, Music Video of the Year; calling it now.
[9]
Taylor Alatorre: MTV Video Music Award for Best Video with a Message-bait.
[5]
Hannah Jocelyn: The only thing keeping me from giving this a [10] is the “she always knew she had something special in-inside”, just sing the line again TROYE!!! Other than that, this is like every era of Sivan’s career at once, from the sparkly wistfulness of Blue Neighbourhood to the campiness of Something to Give Each Other, and also makes me wonder when Jack Antonoff got his subs installed again. Do you mean he chose to make that last Bleachers record sound like that?
[9]
Alex Clifton: I really like the conceit here of “gay man talks about how awesome the women in his life are,” but Sivan’s execution leaves me wanting. For one, it’s probably not a great idea to sound solidly bored for three-quarters of your own song. Maybe there’s a secret passion in his voice that is just flying over my head, but it’s like he’s reading from a teleprompter without actually showing us he believes the words. (I will say the lyrics make great fodder for a “tag yourself” meme; I am “kind of just stays perpetually tired.”) The last minute of the song is where it gets sonically interesting, but at that stage it feels so much like an afterthought that it can’t save the song for me. I am adding a point for the video, though — the wide variety of women plus a rogue Nicole Kidman does add a bit of life to a staid song.
[5]
Leah Isobel: The song equivalent of this tweet; I’m unmoved. [sees Sasha Colby] Okay, I’m a little moved.
[5]
Kayla Beardslee: Joining the squawking crowd of seagulls going “post-Brat, post-Brat, post-Brat.” (George Daniel? What are you doing here?) I could not stand the inside baseball-ness of Music, Fashion, Film — I’m sure it struck the right balance for some people, but personally all I wanted was to stop having discourse shoved down my throat — so with every listen to “She’s the Best,” I feel more grateful for its simplicity, positivity, and ability to hang onto pleasant scraps of melody as an anchor for the deconstructed verses. It is still a spoken-word album intro, so there’s an upper limit to how much it can really accomplish, but I admire how the track dances between frenzy and calm; if our alt-pop stars are going to take left-turns into indieville and exchange their biggest hooks for stream-of-consciousness musings on life and living, I think I would prefer their singles to be gentle and sunkissed like this one.
[7]
Alfred Soto: I’ve dug how he makes albums with songs as expeditious as a bathroom stall hookup. The polite multi-gender orgy snow in the video is sexier than the song, which sports a talk-vocal like Troye thinks he’s Neil Tennant — it sucks.
[4]
Julian Axelrod: The gauzy shuffle and outlandish signifiers feel like Troye’s ode to his dream girl — not a romantic partner, but literally describing a girl he saw in a dream. Best case scenario for a tribute to the divine feminine written by five dudes.
[7]
Nortey Dowuona: Leland as songwriter is plover and crocodile with others but with Troye, they are ostrich and zebra, enhancing his already distinct voice yet smoothing out the edges to slip it past our defenses of apathy and stubbornness. Problem with ostriches is that they have a great sense of smell, but bad eyesight, zebras have great eyes but no sense of smell. What happens when you both can’t see or smell what is wrong?
[5]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Troye, this song is tasteful and funny, and I understand you’re constructing a coy character, but you’re still allowed to sing above a whisper!
[7]
Ian Mathers: Reminds of two things I didn’t expect from Sivan (or, honestly, thought would have coexisted nearly as well as this): the quirkier one-hit wonders of my ’90s adolescence, and Karl Hyde’s solo record. I do think that production is a thing of wonder, so much so that the less successful lyrics here don’t dent it much (the incel line doesn’t quite work for me, maybe because of the pause, which insists upon itself). But I don’t case because I want to hit replay and hear that chunky fucking loop again (wait, third unexpected comparison: Hood’s “The Negatives…“? In a long lost cousin way? A bit?).
[9]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: It’s a bit sentimental; a Hallmark card or a personalized shirt from an Instagram for-and-by people who think they’d never stoop to that sort of thing sincerely. Coating it in what is admittedly a very compelling drum loop does not, exactly, cut through the feeling of gauzy, cheap self-empowerment. Sivan and Co do not really sketch their dream girl with anything more than a set of dashing signifiers — by the time we get to her posting habits, I’ve given up hope of her being anything like an actual life-like figure in the song. Everything is a bit threadbare; yet it really works, against my better instincts, on the strength of Sivan’s bright-eyed and awed vocal performance (every “wow” melts me a bit) and the aforementioned sick drum loop. I can forgive the slightly stale sentiment, as it tuns out, if you let me fall into the groove.
[9]
Tim de Reuse: [Guy who isn’t quite sure what a woman is but is trying really hard to convince you that he’s really into them voice] Yeah, man. I love when women can fight. They can take down incels on the internet. And they DJ. And they can fight. But they’re also really pretty. And I love when they, uh. When they share their roommate’s boyfriend. Hell yeah. D’you know what I mean? Hell yeah.
[3]
Katherine St. Asaph: Should be a perfectly explainable single: Troye Sivan’s sound is malleable and blows with the wind — or blows with the blow, based on the post-Brat cocaine energy he’s tapping into. Yet I have questions. Is this a bit? An A24 pitch? Why does Troye Sivan sound like 3D? Could one call this lady the modern Mary Sue? (Would explain why her idea of “unwinding” is destroying incels on Reddit, an activity that only an ineffective poster could idealize.) Why is he promoting this like Marty Supreme (since that worked out so well for Tim)? Is this going to age well? For anyone but me?
[9]
Jel Bugle: Didn’t really pay close attention to the words, but the delivery was cool. Liked the trashy synths. Maybe this will grate on repeated listen; I think it may well do.
[6]