Rosé channels some seriously hot/cold vibes in the new video for her solo track “Toxic Till the End.” The Avril Lavigne-like emo pop single from the BLACKPINK singer’s eagerly anticipated debut solo album, rosie, stars Gossip Girl actor Evan Mock, who plays Rosé’s love interest in the visual about a couple who meet cute before flaming out.
“Call us what we are/ Toxic from the start/ Can’t pretend that I was in the dark/ When you met my friends/ Didn’t even try with them,” she sings over the track’s bubbling synths as the clip offers up the screen couple’s origin story. It opens with pink-haired Mock flagging down Rosé’s car on a country road after his bicycle pops a flat.
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Instantly intrigued, she gives him a ride and soon enough the couple embark on a classic rom-com montage of their early, happy days. They chase each other through the lush gardens of an estate, laughing and sharing romantic fireside snuggles and sharing a tender moment where the singer signs her beloved’s cast after he wipes out on his skateboard.
The song’s urgent lyrics, though, hint at the brewing issues just underneath the shiny facade. “Jealous and possessive/ So manipulating/ Honestly impressive/ You had me participating,” she seethes as the accompanying visuals hint at a fast-growing flame quickly fizzling out as Mock appears to cover his phone to conceal a rogue text that heralds the beginning of the end.
Rosé burns out in her car and laments the betrayal hinted at in the song’s title, raging, “I can’t forgive you for a lot of things/ For not giving me back my Tiffany rings/ I’ll never forgive you for one thing my dear/ You wasted my prettiest years,” even as she hints at a complicated love too hard to dismiss in the Ramez Silyan-directed video
“When I was running out of your place/ I said I never wanna see your face/ I meant I couldn’t wait to see it again/ We were toxic,” she adds as the song climbs to a raucous din, before downshifting as the messy couple appear to make up again and Rosé reveals that their “chance” meeting might not have been as serendipitous as it seemed.
In a chat with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe about the song that was originally titled “The Ex,” the singer said she wrote the tune after discussing the difficult relationship that inspired it with her friends for years. “We’ve talked about the ex a bit too much, it’s about time that we write a song called ‘the ex’,” she said; she later changed the title to something that felt like a “better punchline.”
“It was actually easy for me to talk about it because it was the thing I was talking about all the time,” she told Lowe about the story she “hated” bringing up over-and-over.
The 12-track rosie includes the hit single “APT.” featuring Bruno Mars — which has spent six weeks so far at No. 1 on the Billboard Global 200 — as well as “Number One Girl,” “Game Boy,” “Drinks or Coffee,” “Stay a Little Longer,” Not the Same” and “Dance All Night.”
Watch the “Toxic Till the End” video below.
