“We weren’t trying for it to end up in the vein of Mickey, that was unintentional!”: The Toni Basil influence on Bruno Mars and Rosé’s APT was accidental, says co-producer Cirkut, as he explains how the song was written and recorded

He might not have released a new solo album since 2016, but for Bruno Mars, the hits just keep on coming. In fact, when Anderson .Paak collaborated with him on their hugely successful An Evening With Silk Sonic album in 2021, he said that getting Mars on your team was like having a “cheat code” for success.

That code was deployed again in 2024, when Mars scored massive hits with both Lady Gaga - Die with a Smile - and, later in the year, Blackpink’s Rosé, via APT. Named after a Korean drinking game, this is a three-minute pop-punk energy shot, with echoes of Toni Basil’s Mickey - the writers of that song, Mike Chapman and Nikki Chinn, are given credits - and British band the Ting Tings.

ROSÉ & Bruno Mars - APT. (Official Music Video) - YouTube

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One of the co-producers of the track was Cirkut, and he recently spoke to Music Week about how APT was born and created.

“It was my first time working with Rosie [Rosé],” he explains. “We had a batch of sessions over the course of a few weeks, and we’d been trying out different ideas - songs which might see the light of day at some point! - before we came up with APT.

“It was the end of our third session or so, and Rosie, Theron Thomas, Amy Allen, Omer Fedi, Rogét Chahayed and I [co-writers] had been working on a different song all day. We were all so tired, but as we were wrapping up, Rosie was telling someone about this Korean drinking game called APT, saying it rhythmically, like ‘A-P-T, A-P-T’. Theron turned around and was like, ‘Wait! What’s that?’”

It was Theron who spotted the potential to turn this rhythmic refrain into a song, says Cirkut, who quickly jumped on the drums and laid down a rough version of the beat.

“In the session, we put down the hook, the ‘Apateu, apateu...’, the drums, then we pretty much wrapped,” he recalls. “The next day, we got in and put down the pre-chorus chords, had a jam, made an arrangement, then we’d play it out and people would freestyle on the mic or throw out ideas and melodies as the song took shape.”

Cirkut says that, initially, Rosé wasn’t sure about the song, and it was put on the back burner. However, at some point, one of the writing team ended up playing it to Mars, and he liked what he heard.

“I don’t know who played it for him, but he and I had worked together before so he texted me, like, ‘Yo, I heard you’re involved with APT, I love it!’,” says Cirkut. “He said he had some ideas and was like, ‘I’ll be in the studio next week!’”

It wasn’t a phoned-in guest vocal spot that Mars had in mind, though - he really wanted to go to work.

“When Bruno gets involved in something, he’s not just a feature, he becomes a part of it,” says Cirkut. “He’s an amazing musician, a producer, a songwriter, an incredible performer - and he’s also hilarious.”

What exactly did Mars bring to the project, then? “When he got in the studio with Rosie, they did some rewriting, tweaked the pre-chorus with the ‘Don’t you want me...’ melody, added the bridge - which is one of my favourite bits - and basically took what was really good in the demo and made it even better,” says Cirkut.

“There were four or five sessions like that, re-recording Rosie’s vocals and Bruno recording his. He also recorded guitar, bass and drums! It was cool seeing their dynamic together; Rosie would be re-recording her vocals and Bruno would be producing them, coaching her, saying, ‘Yeah, do it again Rosie!’, and Rosie was also coaching Bruno on how to pronounce ‘Apateu’. We’d be doing a bunch of takes with him being like, ‘Wait, how do I say it?!’”

The hard work certainly paid off: released in October, APT managed to rack up more than a billion subscription streams by the end of the year. But although he knew that they were onto something, Cirkut says that he could never have predicted just how big the song would be.

“I always knew APT was great, but you never really know how big a song will go,” he admits. “Once it’s done, I like to just let it do its thing - I don’t like to be involved in the marketing or anything, I think of it as letting my baby go and seeing what it does.”

What of those Toni Bail comparisons, though? Was this in the back of the writers’ minds all along?

“We weren’t trying for it to end up in the vein of Mickey, that was unintentional!” says Cirkut. “It just makes people go, ‘Oh, what is that?”