The song's premise is a time paradox: how do you make up for lost time with a person you're only just finding — or haven't found at all? Its answer is to treat love as something that predates the meeting, so that every hour together is already back pay. (French lines below are interpretive translations, not an official translation.)
Born already in love
Lily-Rose Depp's spoken French frames the whole song: "Je suis née amoureuse de toi / Née pour te connaître, pour te nommer" — I was born in love with you, born to know you, to name you. Love is described as a birth condition, something older than acquaintance. The recurring aside "Je connaîtrais déjà ta voix" — I would already know your voice — extends the claim: recognition will precede introduction.
Troye Sivan's verses hold the same idea from the other side: "You're somewhere out there in the ether / And someday soon I wanna meet ya." The addressee is at once present in the song and absent from the singer's life. The duet format sells the illusion — two voices intertwining over a person who exists, so far, only as a destination.
Making up for lost time
The chorus's engine is the phrase "makin' up for lost time," repeated until the words start skipping — "lo—", "lo-lost time" — as if the sentence itself were trying to catch up. Staying up all night becomes the repayment plan: hours redeemed from the years before the meeting.
The verses meanwhile show what the reclaimed time is spent on, and the answer is deliberately ordinary: laughing, talking philosophy, "make me laugh until I'm horny," doing it again. The grand time-paradox resolves into repetition of small pleasures — "do it again, baby" — which is the song's quiet point: lost time is not recovered in bulk, only in loops.
The case against busy
The pre-chorus gives the song its ethic: "Being busy is overrated / Just wanna stay at home and be creative / Just me and my baby." Set against a culture of schedules, the lyric treats unscheduled time together as the creative act itself. "I can't really handle myself when I'm around you" keeps the crush-energy, but the destination is domestic.
The first verse's California montage — "breaking back in California," people "acting kinda crazy" — supplies the outside world that staying in is defined against. The relationship is not an escape from chaos so much as a preference: of all the available noise, "you see through me like the water."
"Lost Time" finally argues that the years before the right person aren't wasted, only pending — and that the way to collect them is unglamorous: stay home, stay up, do it again.
This article is an independent interpretation of the lyrics and metadata listed above, not an official statement of the artists' intent. Translations are interpretive. It does not reproduce the full lyrics. Source and credits: Genius.