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Troye Sivan’s 2023 electro-pop opus, Something to Give Each Other, landed the Australian star three Grammy nominations and launched him into an intense, electrifying couple of years in the spotlight. He wrapped a major headlining tour that took him from Portugal to Sydney, he sold out massive arenas alongside number-one party girl Charli XCX, and he refined his acting chops on HBO’s The Idol. But doing it all took a toll.

“My last album was this hypersexual, super-connected album that I wrote when I was feeling very much like a citizen of the world,” Sivan says. “At some point along the way, a disconnect started to form where I was going home to the hotel by myself, and I actually was feeling deeply lonely a lot of the time.”

That’s how She’s the Best, Sivan’s fourth studio album, out Oct. 9, was born. It takes a more reflective approach as Sivan mixes club-ready bangers with subdued, earnest tracks that drip with desire. “There is this high-octane side to the album that feels really bombastic, and then there are the songs that feel like the interior of my mind,” Sivan explains.

It’s part of Sivan’s musical evolution over two decades, since his first YouTube video uploads in 2007. With this album, it’s clear that Sivan is as thoughtful and candid as ever. “I’m proud of myself for being as honest as I have,” he says.

The video for the album’s first single, “She’s the Best,” stars fellow Aussie Nicole Kidman. Why did you want to cast her?
We worked together on a movie in 2018 called Boy Erased. I got her number, couldn’t believe it. I didn’t utilize it. Then when [director] Gordon von Steiner and I were talking about “She’s the Best,” we were like, “Who is someone that everyone in the world can understand what we’re trying to show?” And we were like, “It’s Nicole.” So I asked her to do it. 

I was on a Zoom with someone and my phone started ringing, and it was an unknown number. I start seeing the voicemail transcript because I don’t answer unknown numbers. I let it go to voicemail, and then I see the transcription starts coming. It’s like, “Hi, darling Troye, it’s Nic,” and I slammed my laptop shut and just ended the meeting, picked up the phone, and she was like, “I would love to do it.” 

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There’s a lot of drag featured in the video, and you appear in drag. What role has that played in your life?
The song is really honoring the feminine spirit in general. I think it’s something that I grew up fighting. My parents are not homophobic and never have been, but some of my earliest memories are fixing the way that I stood. I have a friend who’s straight, but he would hang his wrist, and I remember being seven years old and thinking, “What is he doing? Why is he doing that? He needs to fix that because otherwise people are going to think that he’s gay.”

I knew that I was gay. I’ve always known. So it totally petrified me. Over the years, I’ve chipped away at that shame and, through it, found so much freedom and power. Doing drag for the first time, something was unlocked where I was just like, “Oh, my God, this feels really special.” What a relief to finally let yourself just sit in that and be.

Were there specific people in your life that you were thinking of while you were writing “She’s The Best?”
It’s a collage of so many people in my life, but specific lyrics definitely are attributed to different people. I’m in my happiest place when I am standing next to a woman being like, “Everyone, look at this. Do you see what I see?”

I’m a gay guy. To be able to have made music with Ariana [Grande] … Lily-Rose Depp is a really close friend of mine; I filmed The Idol with her for a year and a half basically. And then touring with Charli [XCX] and growing up sort of alongside her … From a professional standpoint, I’ve always just loved being in the orbit of these women. It’s definitely a love letter to all of those people.

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You posted pictures of Addison Rae on Instagram with the caption “STB.” Are we teasing something with her?
Honestly, no. I just think she’s 100% one of the girls, that she has that thing where you’re just like, “Wow.” She’s effervescent. She’s like sunshine. She’s the sweetest girl in the whole world and truly has a star quality that is just absolutely undeniable. 

We go into this wig shop and she goes into the window, which is on Hollywood Boulevard, and she’s got this big red wig on, and she’s doing all this crazy shit, and I’m just like, “Wow.” You know what I mean? I’m there with my phone taking a million photos of her. Also, genuinely one of the best pop albums of the last 15 years. That album was so clear and inspired and cool.

Jack Antonoff is credited with production and writing. You guys first worked together in 2015 on “Heaven.” Why did you reach out to him again for this?
Something that I love about Jack [is] the way that he works is everything is set up and ready to go. He’s got obviously the most insane gear, and he’s a very, very talented multi-instrumentalist. The process is so alive and vibrant. He’ll walk up to something and play it, and he will play it maybe twice, and then he moves over to the next thing. It’s this very free process, and so that was inspiring. 

If you’re about to leave the party, what songs make you run back to the dance floor?
That happened recently. I was about to leave, and then I heard “Can’t Get You Out My Head,” by Kylie Minogue, and I was like, “This is such a perfect song.” It’s slinky and sexy. I fucking love that song so much. 

Dance music is music that you really, really live life to, and it’s OK to take your time and let things build and have the kind of restraint to create that tension.

In “Troye Meets World,” there’s a line, “Music meet body, body meet music.” You sing a lot about dancing – how has your relationship with going out changed over those years?
It’s almost aspirational sometimes, because the moments where I do feel truly free are when I’m dancing in a place where I feel safe. I think that that, unfortunately, is not always the case. Over time, something that I have sort of had to come to terms with is that I’m a gay guy; I want to go dance with gay guys and queer people. Those are also just statistically, demographic-wise, a lot of the people who listen to my music. As things have gotten sort of more crazy, I had to try and find spaces where I could go and still let loose in the way that I feel like I need to.

I think that’s also why I take partying so seriously is because I think that there’s a spiritual need, a human need to let loose. That’s what the “Party” video explores. In the visual for that, we were talking about partying and again how seriously I take it and how I do think it’s an innate human thing. Obviously people have always partied. In some capacity, people have always needed to let loose. So the conversation became, “Okay, well, what would this party have looked like back then? Where were all the queer people and what were they up to?” Even this throughline between the “She’s the Best” video and the “Party” video…the characters that we meet and see in “She’s the Best,” I feel like we meet and see them in a very different version, in “Party.”

What were you listening to, reading, watching, while creating the world of “She’s The Best?”
I don’t listen to a ton of, at least not at the moment, of straight-down-the-middle pop. My references are really all over the place. It’s everything from The Avalanches to King Krule and Arthur Russell and Madonna and Kylie. Somehow all of those things make sense to me in the same world.

[“She’s The Best”] was written over a fairly long period of time, so I read quite a bit. There was a book that I read, a very short book by Annie Ernaux. She wrote about this idea of going to the doctors to sit in the waiting room because it was one of the only places where she could sit and think guilt-free about this man that she’s in love with. I loved that so much. There’s a lyric in the album that’s exactly that.

It’s been three years since your last album. Why was it important for you to take this time?
The thing is, it doesn’t even feel like I took my time. I don’t understand how people do it. I think they must be writing while they’re touring. I don’t have that in me. Some of the songs are a year old, some of them are a couple of months old. I think I only know through sitting with them that they stand the test of time to me. I need time to curate the world and I want it to be fully realized. I think I would really, really, really kick myself if I ever felt like I had rushed something.

What’s your favorite song on the album?
I love them all for such different reasons. I think because it is so varied, it’s something for every mood a little bit for me. I really love “Love So Big It Hurts.” That’s the one that’s got the line about waiting in the doctor’s suite just to buy more time. The melody of the verses felt like a gift. There was something, humbly, very classic about the way that that sounded, and it was over strings and guitar. I also love “Cowboy.”

Closing track “Lost Time” features a French monologue from your friend, Lily-Rose Depp. Tell me about why she was the right person for that.
I met her and it was instant. She is so funny and so warm, and just obviously one of the “She’s the Best” girls. Watching her exist, it boggles the mind. “Lost Time” is another one of those manifestation songs where I detail this love, swimming in the pool and the guy sees through me like water and I love that about him. He really cuts through all the bullshit and can see me. Then it’s revealed halfway through the song, basically, “Hope to meet you one day,” to whoever I’m singing to. It’s like how I just want to stay at home and be creative with my guy, making up for lost time because it’s taken us so long to meet each other.

Then I wanted something that felt romantic and intimate and close to me. I asked Lily if she would come by, and she wrote that in the booth. It was two takes and it had the perfect energy.

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The last tour you went on was the Sweat Tour, with Charli XCX. How was that?
One of the craziest moments in my life. What an insane time. There’ve been a few things that I’ve been a part of where you really feel like you just catch a wave of some sort. She’s a visionary. I feel like to know Charli is to be inspired by Charli.

For as long as you’ve been making music, you’ve been considered an icon for queer young people. Even YouTuber Joey Graceffa said that you were one of the inspirations for him coming out. How does that sit with you?
It’s a crazy feeling because it’s daunting. I appreciate it so much. I have to say thank you to my friends and my family because they created a really, really, really solid support system for me to feel like I could write songs about boys when I was 18. I think if I was in a situation where maybe that was more precarious, maybe I wouldn’t have felt like I could put myself out there in that way. %!s()

Different people rack up that total in different ways: Some people spend all day doing battle on X, while some find themselves drawn into TikTok's unending videos, so there's no one thing that uses the most data. Although there is no lone culprit, these usually do the most damage: video streaming, social media, video calls, software updates, cloud backups and music streaming. For what it's worth, on most of these you can control how much data they consume through a quality setting or two.

Video streaming and video calls are the biggest drains

Video streaming services, including Netflix, YouTube and Prime Video, among others, consume a significant amount of data, especially if you're watching at the highest resolution. Let's start with the most popular video platform: YouTube. On low resolution (360p), YouTube consumes around 500MB per hour; on 720p, roughly 2GB per hour; on 1080p, it's 3GB per hour; and on 4K UHD, an hour on YouTube can consume over 15GB of data.

Netflix is a bit more considerate with your data. The platform uses 300MB per hour on Low quality settings, 700MB (0.7GB) per hour on Standard definition, around 3GB per hour on HD and up to 7GB of data per hour on Ultra HD (4K). Amazon Prime Video, on the other hand, offers three quality options: Good, Better and Best. Good streams at 480p and uses around 0.72GB per hour; Better streams in HD and uses roughly 1.8GB of data per hour; and finally, Best streams at 4K and consumes nearly 6.8GB per hour.

On the other side of the video spectrum are video calls (and conferences). On average, video calls consume around 500MB per hour, though platforms built for group conferencing like Zoom use much more. A one-on-one Zoom call will consume about 540MB per hour at 480p, 1.08GB per hour at 720p and over 1.62GB per hour at 1080p. Group calls use more data: 810MB per hour at 480p, 1.35GB per hour at 720p and 2.48GB per hour at 1080p, since Zoom has to download a separate audio and video stream for every participant.

Social media data usage depends on how you use it

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It's not uncommon for a single social media post to include text, images and videos, so how much data it consumes can vary widely depending on the exact platform and the type of posts you're viewing. TikTok is mostly short videos, and depending on the resolution, an hour of scrolling can use around 750MB to 1GB of data. Instagram is a mix of photos and videos unless you're spending more time on Reels. On average, Instagram (Reels included) can use up to 1.5GB of data per hour. Text and image posts still dominate Facebook, so it uses a conservative 500MB per hour. That figure can stretch up to 1GB per hour if you start watching more videos. Text-focused social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn use far less data than their video-heavy counterparts. X uses as little as 50MB to 1GB of data per hour, and LinkedIn consumes around 120MB to 240MB per hour. And as usual, these figures can change dramatically if you consume more video content on either platform.

Updates, cloud backups and music streaming add up too

Tsingha25/Getty Images

Software updates are another major but low-key guzzler of data, largely because most updates and backups happen in the background. A single iOS update can run anywhere from a few hundred megabytes to more than 12GB if it's a major release. Android updates follow the same pattern, but the exact size varies depending on the device and the manufacturer. Cloud backups add to that total, but how much data is consumed depends on what exactly is being backed up.

Music streaming uses relatively little data. At its highest quality settings, a single song on Spotify streams at 320kbps, which translates into 144MB per hour. On default quality settings, an hour of Spotify consumes around 43MB. But that can quickly add up if you stream music for long hours or you're listening in Apple Music's lossless audio quality, which uses roughly 720MB per hour, or as much as 2.9GB per hour at Hi-Res Lossless. Across nearly every category covered, you can cut down data usage by simply downloading content over Wi-Fi for offline playback later on. Once something is downloaded, it won't use your data plan again. %!s()

Sapkowski has confirmed that his next novel in The Witcher universe is already underway, with the Polish author targeting a 2027 completion date.

As reported by Redanian Intelligence, speaking on stage at the Copernicon convention in Torun, Poland, Sapkowski revealed that he has outlined his next book and is actively writing. While specific narrative details remain under wraps, Sapkowski shot down a fan question asking whether he would consider writing a novel centered on other characters, such as Yennefer of Vengerberg, confirming the story will once again focus on Geralt of Rivia.

The news aligns directly with comments Sapkowski made during our recent interview with the author and his English translator, David French. When asked whether he felt there was room to explore Geralt’s formative years further following the prequel Crossroads of Ravens, which tells us the story of an 18-year-old Geralt, Sapkowski offered a characteristically sharp response:

"Room? Sky is the limit."

Paperback

Crossroads of Ravens (The Witcher)

While Sapkowski is yet to confirm whether this next novel is unquestionably another Geralt prequel novel, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to assume that's what we're likely getting.

Beyond this, Sapkowski also revealed to IGN that he is open to returning to the short story format that kicked off his Witcher novels with The Last Wish.

"It is not an easy thing to create a good short story," Sapkowski explained. "This is much more difficult than writing a novel... But if one succeeds, it is proof of writing mastery."

"It is not easy to nicely and logically lead that straight line from point A to point B and that with a word count of less than some 8,000 words... Now, answering your question: yes, I am considering writing more short stories."

Assuming Sapkowski hits his targeted completion date at the end of 2027, Polish readers can likely expect the book on shelves sometime in late 2027 or 2028, with English translations most likely following shortly after in late 2028 or 2029. If achieved, a four-year turnaround between Crossroads of Ravens and his next work would mark Sapkowski's fastest output since The Lady of the Lake in 1999.

Sapkowski has also said he is "open to suggestions" on any unconventional adaptations The Witcher could venture to next, amusingly pointing out that there have already been two musicals.

The Witcher certainly isn't slowing down either, in that regard, starting with a slate of full cast audiobook dramas that are set to release through the rest of 2026 and 2027. That starts with Crossroads of Ravens, the aforementioned Witcher prequel, and will be followed up by The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny in November.

Hardcover

Crossroads of Ravens (The Witcher)

Robert Anderson

Senior Commerce Editor

Robert Anderson is a Senior Commerce Editor for IGN. Based in London, UK, he is a qualified journalist with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism (First Class Degree) and over seven years of professional writing and editing experience.

You can usually find Robert lost in open-world RPG games like Elden Ring and Cyberpunk 2077. Outside of gaming, his passions include reading comics (especially Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man), taking photos, and keeping up with the latest in film and TV.

His primary coverage focuses on tracking down the best gaming deals and diving into the fast-paced world of Trading Card Games (TCGs). He regularly covers everything from the latest releases in Pokémon TCG and the most expensive cards to comprehensive Magic: The Gathering buying guides. %!s()

At 19 years and two months old, the Egyptian eclipsed the previous record set by New Zealand’s Susan Devoy, who was 20 years and two months old in 1984.

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Orfi dethroned compatriot Hania El Hammamy from world number one when she defeated the 26-year-old 3-2 in the Qatar Classic final (7-11, 11-7, 11-8, 7-11, 12-10). The victory earned Orfi her first Platinum title, third major victory and 15th win of her career.

“Sweat, tears, heartbreaks, and tons of sacrifices all for this moment,” she wrote in an Instagram post on Monday, when the official Professional Squash Association (PSA) rankings update weekly.

Orfi’s historic milestone is the latest of her outstanding year. In May, she became the youngest world champion at 18 years and 10 months when she beat then world number two Nour El-Sherbini in a thrilling five-game final at the World Championships in Egypt.

The win made her the first player to hold both the world junior and senior PSA championship titles at the same time. The PSA is the global governing body for men’s and women’s professional squash circuits.

“It feels amazing,” Orfi said after her victory in Doha on Friday.

“To become world champion and become world number one in the same year is a dream that I’ve had since I was very young and I really want to enjoy it.

“I want to just stay at this level now and keep trying to improve every day. I want to stay on top now that I’m the world number one, and I want to win a lot more titles too,” said Orfi, who has been in the world’s top three since last October. %!s()

Gov. Gavin Newsom officially signed off Sunday on state bill SB 931, which recognizes Sept. 25 — or 9/25, a nod to Parton’s hit “9 to 5” — as a day to celebrate the late country legend in the Golden State.

“Dolly Parton sparkled on every stage she ever stood on, but her brightest sparkle was the literacy legacy she built through the Imagination Library,” state Sen. Shannon Grove (R) — who co-authored the bipartisan bill with state Sen. John Laird (D) — said in a statement (via ABC 7).

“The love Dolly gave so freely, rooted in her deep and openly shared faith, and the love the world returned to her, shows how deeply she was cherished by everyone … every Sept. 25th, our state will remember the legend who put millions of books in the hands of our youngest readers and inspired the world on how to respect and love one another.”

The city of San Francisco will also hold a free “Dolly Day” celebration on Sept. 25, a “joyful day of music, rhinestones, and remembrance.”

The city of Nashville, which already renamed its airport after Parton, have also designated Sept. 25 as Dolly Parton Day, Mayor Freddie O’Connell previously announced, planning a day’s worth of citywide events celebrating the singer and culminating with a fireworks show.

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The city of Portland, Oregon, also declared 9/25 as Dolly Parton Day. “On 9/25, let’s celebrate Dolly the way she lived,” city council president Jamie Dunphy said. “Play music. Read a book with a child. Help a neighbor. Stand up for someone who needs it. Give something back. Whatever it is, let’s do it the Dolly way, with kindness, grace and a lot of joy!”

Texas’ Montgomery and Hayes counties also approved resolutions declaring Sept. 25 as Dolly Parton Day. %!s()