For her part, Rosé broke out with rosie’s lead single “APT.,” an infectious pop-rock collaboration with Bruno Mars. Despite the track’s simple structure and premise, which riffs on a Korean drinking game, Rosé lets loose. Her vocals soar over fuzzy synths and catchy percussion, narrating the highs, lows, and inherent humor of a night spent in a drunken stupor. Crucially, the song showcases her most valuable instrument: her voice, a malleable asset that can chant, shout, harmonize, and sing without losing the timbre that makes it recognizable in any language.
The rest of rosie doesn’t capture the same spark: Its dominant narrative of heartbreak is more preoccupied with trying on different styles for size. Third single “Toxic Till the End” is an almost clinical synth-pop track that kicks off an energetic, genre-confused four-song run that represents the album’s most interesting arc. There’s a booming bass synth reminiscent of Taylor Swift’s 1989, a motif that could have boosted the record’s emotional peaks if it appeared more than once or twice. The lyrics detail a bad relationship in which both parties are complicit, building to a cathartic bridge: “I can forgive you for a lot of things/For not giving me back my Tiffany rings,” Rosé sings. “I’ll never forgive you for one thing, my dear/You wasted my prettiest years.” Her rage is a welcome departure on an album that otherwise mostly expresses longing or regret.
Musically, rosie plants itself in the shadow of pop’s recent past, falling somewhere between Sam Smith’s In the Lonely Hour and Halsey’s Badlands. There’s “Drinks or Coffee,” an attempt at a sultry, R&B-inflected pop hit torn between naughty and nice; there’s the punny red-flag anthem “Gameboy,” which layers an acoustic guitar loop over a nonspecific jungle track; there’s “Two Years,” another take on 1989-era Swift. The final third of the tracklist meets Rosé’s power-ballad vocals with bland coffeehouse sounds, like the pretty fingerpicked guitar on “Not the Same” or the muffled piano on “Call It the End.”
Even with the support of a major label, a star-studded committee of songwriters and producers, and Rosé’s eight years of experience in BLACKPINK, rosie offers nothing revealing or exciting. Its writing pales in comparison to the canon of great breakup albums, with lines like, “In the desert of us, all our tears turned to dust/Now the roses don’t grow here.” Rosé’s recounting of the undoing of this relationship feels distant: There’s a “we,” an “us,” and an “I” accompanied by a “you,” but no real assertion of her own point of view, whether in the context of her persona Rosé or as 27-year-old Rosie. Compare this to her work with BLACKPINK; on “Lovesick Girls,” she sang, between Korean and English: “Love is slippin’ and fallin’/Love is killin’ your darlin’,” balancing the experience of joy and pain. In trying to live up to the “personal album” trope, rosie opts to explore rather than define, and the emotional grooves are polished smooth. Whether you’re a new fan or a devoted Blink (as BLACKPINK fans are known), you’re likely to feel left cold.
