The biggest solo breakout in K-pop history followed it up with a garage-punk single shot on a telephone.
The camera was a phone. Dave Meyers, who has made videos for Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Harry Styles and Ariana Grande, shot every frame of the New Trick clip on an iPhone 18 Pro, because the video is also an advertisement for it. Apple and Rosé announced the arrangement on September 9, 2026, and the song landed eight days later as part of the company’s “Shot on iPhone” campaign, the same slot that previously carried The Weeknd, Olivia Rodrigo and Lady Gaga. What arrived inside that corporate packaging is the scrappiest record she has made.
The Black Label and Atlantic released New Trick on September 17, 2026 in the United States, which was the morning of September 18 in Seoul, where her agency announced it. It belongs to no album. Rosé’s last solo release of any kind was On My Mind with Alex Warren in 2025, and before that Messy, written for the F1 movie. Her only studio album, rosie, came out in December 2024 and is still the record every conversation about her starts from, because of the song sitting at the front of it.
That song is the reason a hardware company builds a campaign around her. APT., her collaboration with Bruno Mars, debuted at No.8 on the Hot 100 in October 2024, the highest position any female K-pop act had reached, and then spent months refusing to leave. Its video passed a billion YouTube views in 105 days, breaking a record Gangnam Style had held for twelve years. She became the first K-pop artist of any kind to top Billboard’s Pop Airplay chart. None of that was supposed to be repeatable, and the interesting thing about the follow-up is that she did not try.
A song written two days after the Met Gala
Rosé wrote New Trick in May 2026, during what she has described as a hectic week, two days after attending the Met Gala. Amy Allen, who co-wrote APT., worked on it with her, and Andrew Wells, who had written with her on Stay a Little Longer, produced. What the three of them made is closer to garage punk than to anything on rosie, which is an album largely built on heartbreak taken slowly. Tom Breihan at Stereogum called it an “explosively catchy piece of bubblegum synth-punk,” which is about right for a record that gets in and out without a single moment of self-pity.
The subject is the same one she has been writing about since 2024, handled from the other end. The album treated a breakup as something that happens to you. This one treats it as something you get better at surviving, and Rosé has described the difference as humor and momentum replacing vulnerability. She called it the cutest thing she and her collaborators had ever made, which is not a phrase anyone applies to rosie. The video follows the same logic: a band, a summer, a skatepark, a performer visibly enjoying herself rather than being photographed beautifully.
There is a version of this career where the follow-up to a record that broke YouTube is another duet engineered to do it again. Instead she made a two-and-a-half-minute punk song about getting over somebody and let a phone company pay for the film. The leverage APT. bought her was the freedom not to repeat it, and this is what she spent it on.
