Britney Spears performing during her Britney: Piece of Me residency in Las Vegas in January 2014. Photo by rhysadams, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons — Britney Spears, Piece of Me, January 2014

Britney Spears has released her first new music in three years. It is a song she recorded in 2001 and left in the vault.

The track is called “She’ll Never Be Me.” It dropped Friday, one day before this story ran, ahead of the Nov. 6 release of Britney (25th Anniversary Edition). The 44-year-old recorded it for her third album, Britney, but it never made the final cut.

The song has a pointed story. Spears sings to an ex who has moved on with a woman who looks like her. The message is that the copy is no match for the original.

Justin Timberlake, who was her boyfriend at the time, co-wrote the song. Bradley Daymond and Alex Greggs also share writing credit, and Riprock ’n’ Alex G produced it.

Nothing in the release says who the song is about. Fans will draw their own lines anyway.

The track is one of five previously unreleased songs on the reissue. The others are “Am I a Sinner,” “When I Say So” and “My Big Secret.” The fifth is a studio recording of “Right Now (Taste the Victory),” which first appeared in a 2002 Pepsi commercial.

The timing matters for Spears. Her last original release was “Mind Your Business,” a 2023 team-up with will.i.am. The two had earlier scored a No. 3 hit with 2012’s “Scream & Shout.”

Her most recent chart entry came in 2022. “Hold Me Closer,” a duet with Elton John, reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100. It blended his songs “Tiny Dancer” and “The One” over new production.

That means the next Spears song to hit the airwaves was written when she was a teenager. It also lands as the singer has spent recent years reclaiming her story, including in her memoir, The Woman in Me.

The original Britney album arrived after the megahits “...Baby One More Time” and “Oops!... I Did It Again.” It was her bid to grow up in public. Lead single “I’m a Slave 4 U” peaked at No. 27 on the Hot 100. She launched it with a now-famous 2001 MTV VMAs performance, dancing with a python draped over her shoulders.

The album closed with “What It’s Like to Be Me,” her only other song with Timberlake.

Twenty-five years later, one song from that era is finally out. Whether she or Timberlake will say anything about it is unclear. The lyrics already did the talking.