ROSÉ Is On Top
“You can call me Rosie,” ROSÉ says.
She’s video calling from New York City, where she’s in town for an undisclosed video shoot. She’s currently in cozy mode: Her dyed strawberry blonde hair hangs relaxed around her clean and bare face, and she’s dressed in a solid gray tee she’s accessorized with a few layered necklaces. The heavy red curtains of her hotel room are drawn tightly behind her. “I'm sorry, I'm sick today,” she says, leaning off screen to quietly request some tea, her soft-spoken, New-Zealand-inflected English switching to rapid Korean. Despite any illness, she’s wide-eyed and all smiles. “I've been traveling,” she tells PAPER, “but I've been better than ever.”
She has many reasons to be beaming. It’s five days after the release of “APT,” her punchy and long-awaited solo debut with a diamond-level feature from Bruno Mars, and she’s still riding that high. Granted, she was a little nervous initially about how it’d be received, but the immediate avalanche of TikToks and positive chatter have since eased that worry. “Now that I'm getting live feedback on how fans are feeling about everything, I think I'm starting to enjoy it.” She corrects herself. “I'm definitely enjoying it now.”
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Her one, maybe, small hesitation is around this part of the process: press. “Now I have to be me, the personality that people want to see,” she says. “It's been a bit of a rocky start, mentally.”
The personality she’s referring to is, of course, one that needs no introduction (though I’ll give one, anyway). For the past eight years, Rosie — real name Roseanne Park — has been better known as ROSÉ, one-fourth of the dominating K-pop force BLACKPINK and arguably the world’s most talked-about girl group since the advent of the Spice Girls. Alongside fellow members Jennie, Lisa and Jisoo, the group broke records and sold out tours as one of the first K-pop girl groups to not only commercially crossover globally — but dominate.
Dress: Kate Barton
But things have slightly shifted since then. On December 23, 2023, BLACKPINK’s record label, YG Entertainment, announced that ROSÉ, alongside fellow members Jennie, Lisa and Jisoo, declined to renew their solo contracts with the company and would be striking out on their own (future BLACKPINK activities would still be managed by the company). For the first time ever, they were free agents.
That brings us to this moment — 10 months after that announcement and less than two months before the arrival of her debut solo album, rosie — an album she didn’t know she had in her. “It was a big dream,” she says of the project, dropping December 6. “I didn't want to say it to everyone because I was worried I wouldn't be able to deliver an album that I was proud of.” But now, she says, “I’m excited and proud to release it.”
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For the hundreds of millions of BLINKs around the world, BLACKPINK’s final Born Pink show on September 17, 2023 at Seoul’s Gocheok Sky Dome was a bittersweet end to an era. It was the literal end of a year-long tour that “felt like it was going on forever,” ROSÉ says. After multiple years of frenzied group activity and promotions, there was also chatter that a much-deserved break for the girl group was imminent.
Backstage, the atmosphere was that of “a big celebration,” ROSÉ remembers, but she was also balancing a whole range of emotions. She recalls almost crying on stage during their first song, right before “the most badass part at the very beginning.” “I had to tell myself not to. I was like, ‘Don't cry right now because I'm not going to be able to sing,’” she laughs at the memory. “We were proud of ourselves and we were just happy to be back home.”
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After the December 23 announcement, it was a waiting game. Nobody knew when BLACKPINK members would announce their next steps. Jennie was first, announcing her label and agency Odd Atelier on December 23; Then Lisa, sharing Lloud on February 8, while Jisoo announced Blissoo on February 21. On June 18, ROSÉ finally revealed she’d signed on to YG’s The Black Label for “music management.”
She says her news broke so late because she “didn’t have a solid plan” for next steps. She had a few things she wanted to do — make an album — but she didn’t want to get ahead of herself; she’d made music solo before (2021’s R) but never a complete album. “I was gonna have to bet on it, and just trust in the decisions that I made,” she says.
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She thought she’d start small and booked a few songwriting sessions in Los Angeles after the tour. She hadn’t participated in many songwriting sessions before and felt “doubtful” that she’d write anything good. After making a few-sessions worth of material, she flew back home to Korea and played some songs for her friends. “And they were like, ‘Rosie, I think you should really do this,’” she remembers.
That feedback emboldened her. Soon, a week’s trip turned into a two-week trip, which turned into another two-week trip, and then a month trip, and then two-month trips, she says. By that point, she was “very heavily invested in my album.”
On September 16, she revealed she’d signed to Atlantic Records in a “worldwide deal” for the release of rosie. There’s no doubt she could’ve had her pick of the bunch, but she says she ultimately went with Atlantic because, “when I met them, I was like, I love these people. I could talk to them. They were all so cool. I have to wrap this album up with people who are gonna help me, and I loved everyone there.”
As she recounts this whole process, ROSÉ emphasizes the care she took in advancing forward each step. “It was decisions that I made when it felt right,” she says, “and yeah, I'm happy with it because it was my decision, ultimately, all the time.”
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Maybe, another reason why ROSÉ decided to sign with Atlantic Records is because it’s the home to stars like Ed Sheeran, Coldplay, Charli xcx and Bruno Mars.
When we start talking about the chart-topping singer and why she tapped him for the feature on “APT,” she becomes the most animated in our conversation, sitting up to enthusiastically recount her experience seeing him live for the first time in concert in 2023 and being “blown away,” she says. “I never knew I knew all those words to Bruno Mars' songs! It felt like a whole dictionary of how to be talented.”
And for the record, it was Mars himself who picked “APT” as his feature. She’d sent his team three options, and “was the only one that strongly believed he would do ‘APT,’” she says. “Everyone was like, ‘No, he's not going to do it, don't send it.’ And I was like, ‘No, what the hell!’ It's that song or nothing. Well, he got the memo.” Mars asked her what “APT” meant. “I was like, ‘It's a Korean drinking game,’” she responded. “He's like, ‘That's sick.’”
Dress: Kate Barton
That’s part of the reason her team didn’t think Mars would pick the song and why ROSÉ was initially worried about the single’s reception: The song’s subject matter — inspired by a popular South Korean drinking game of the same name that involves players stacking their hands as the floors of an apartment — is “a little random” for the album’s first single, ROSÉ admits. But, as she defends, “I knew it was a dancey, fun song so I knew people would like it.” Her bet paid off and the release of “APT” has been enthusiastic, spawning TikTok dances, and countless curious articles about the game. It’s since also broken records, making ROSÉ the first-ever female Korean act to debut as high as No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100.
In addition to the song’s punkish, The Ting Tings-reminiscent beat, ROSÉ credits the general rise of global interest in Korean culture as a contributing factor to the song’s success. “I know that people are starting to learn about it more and more,” she says. “Korean culture is, I would say, one of the most fun cultures out there. To be able to show that to the world, it's like a personal excitement for me.”
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For those who heard “APT” and are expecting the rest of rosie to be an equally cheerful affair, you may want to switch out your soju for tissues. When I get the chance to hear a six-song sampler of the album, I quickly clock that its actual themes are much heavier than after-work bar games.
She recorded rosie over the past year in week- and month-long stints in Los Angeles with a gamut of producers and songwriters, primarily Amy Allen (of “Espresso” fame) and Michael Pollack (Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé, Lizzo) — “my mom and dad,” she says of their involvement. It’s a capital-P pop album with shades of intimate Swiftian storytelling and cathartic, soaring hooks as she paints a narrative of a love gone wrong: missed red flags, having dark nights of the soul at 3 AM and being toxic until the end.
“What about these theeemes,” she dramatically intones, echoing my question with a grin. “I think I'm grateful enough to have gone through a few relationships, you know, like a normal girl in her 20s. I do want people to understand that I'm not much different from your average girlfriend, or 23-year-old girl. I'm probably very relatable if you listen to my songs, and if anyone's been in that kind of a relationship. It doesn't even have to be about a boyfriend, just any type of toxic relationship.”
She adds, “[Your] 20s is not an easy time to live through. It's when you're very vulnerable and confused, excited and angry about life. That's what I wanted to sing about.”
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She takes aim at expert manipulators and emotional traitors, with which anyone will resonate. But there are also songs only she, a global superstar with a collective 80+ million followers across social media, can understand, like the singular experience of going on the internet and scrolling through pages and pages of strangers posting critical comments about you.
ROSÉ admits she has a bad habit of doom-scrolling late into the night, which will sometimes lead her down rabbit holes of “bad comments that’s just going to get into my head.” One song on the record was written after such a stint. “I realized how vulnerable and addicted I was to this [online] world and that craving for feeling like I wanted to be loved and understood,” she says of the impetus behind the track. “I hated that about myself.”
She decided she’d write a song that’s “so disgustingly vulnerable and honest that people learn that I am a person that goes through these emotions, and I hated that about myself. If anything, it's something I want to cover up. Even in interviews, I’m like nothing really fazes me, you know? But it does. Every word, every comment, it crushes me.”
As the girl with “the golden voice,” as dubbed by Korean fans and media, she’s never sounded as almighty and at-home as on this stadium-sized ballad — and her desperation to be understood is hair-raising and palpable: “Tell me I’m that I’m loved/ Tell me that I’m worth it and that I’m enough/ I need it and I don’t know why,” she belts. “A lot of songs that didn't make it were the songs where I was like, ‘No, I don't resonate with that one.’ All the songs that did the magic made the album,” she says.
Dress: Wiederhoeft, Shoes: Saint Laurent
For the majority of the last year as she was making rosie. ROSÉ's days resembled a sleep-work hamster wheel. She would wake up at noon, get to the studio by 2 PM., write and record, finish between 7 and 10 PM, have dinner at the hotel or studio, then sleep. “And repeated that for days on end and days on end,” she says. “I would fly back to Korea and obviously there really wasn't much to do there, so fly back.” She didn’t have many friends and became a bit of a workaholic.
It was “a very toxic” work-life balance, she says. But still, ROSÉ enjoyed her simpler life. She learned to drive and finally got her license, and spent a lot of time “diving into me.” She consciously pulled back from attending public events as ROSÉ the star because she wanted to foster an environment where she could access the “Rosie that’s embedded inside of me, not the Rosie people see.” (And before you ask, no, she did not acquire any new hobbies. “That's the hardest question everyone asks me! What's a hobby? My hobby is my work. Maybe I'm the type of person that can do one thing at a time.”
The songs she made were kept close to her chest, only shown to her closest circle and a few of the BLACKPINK members.
Though she says all of their solo schedules have largely kept them busy and apart, she’s been able to have a few reunions (including an NYC baddie meet up with Jennie in May 2024). During a trip back to Korea last year, ROSÉ was in a car with LISA and played her a few songs. “She was like, ‘Oh my god, this is so cool, I love it,’” ROSÉ remembers. “That’s when she was like, ‘Rosie, you have to make lots of songs for us.’ And I was like, ‘Thank you so much for saying that.’ I felt so great.”
ROSÉ says her album is about the “terrible 20s,” and at 27, she’s already more than halfway through her decade, one that’s been defined by wild success but also wild misunderstandings about her and who she is. But she sees rosie as her opportunity to finally set the record straight.
“At the end of the day, I want people to understand me and stop misunderstanding me as a person as well,” she says. “I'm ready to be a bit more vulnerable and open and honest in order for people to not misunderstand, and take me for what I am.”
