During this time of quarantine, Rosalía just wants to give you the energy to dance. She just dropped 'TKN,' her highly-anticipated collaboration with Travis Scott, along with a wild music video perfect for these times.
After months of staying at home and doing nothing, Rosalía just wants to get out on the streets and move. She does exactly that in the new video for “TKN,” the collaboration with Travis Scott that she just released. In the video, the world turns into one part dance party, one part Lord of the Flies. Feral children roam the streets, forming vicious dance gangs, without a grownup in sight. Travis Scott – who raps in Spanish on the track – is found in a warehouse. There’s a giant donut that gets devoured by a horde of hungry kids. It is, in a sense, a huge quarantine mood.
“Travis is an artist who I’ve admired a lot since the beginning of his career, and I can’t imagine a better artist to collaborate with on this song,” Rosalía said in a statement announcing the collab’s release on Thursday, per Complex. She also noted that unlike other artists who have postponed the release of new music due to the COVID-19 outbreak, “now is the moment” to drop the song. “[A]fter so many months of staying indoors, missing freedom, or being with people we love…I hope ‘TKN’ gives you energy, makes you dance, and gives you strength if you’re going through difficult times.”
This isn’t the first time that Travis and Rosalía have worked together. The two teamed up for a remix of “Highest In The Room,” found on his 2019 JackBoys compilation. While speaking with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in April, Rosalía gushed about Travis. “You know that there are artists that when they come into the room, everybody likes, gets smaller,” she said, per Complex. “But with Travis, it’s not like that. It’s not like that. Everybody flows with him, he’s flowing, and it’s beautiful like that. And I think that he’s very special and that we had a lot of fun. And also I think that he has lots of layers…Like, I think, as an artist, what makes his art and his work so good, I think it’s because he has so much layers in his personality, not just as an artist.” She also praised Travis’s bilingual bars. “I really love that he wanted to sing in Spanish… That’s historic. That’s history.”
Rosalía also revealed she was initially hesitant to drop the song – because it might be a little too much of a banger. “I was like, ‘This song is so aggressive’… It has an energy, I think, that is so specific for a certain moment, that I didn’t feel like it was right to release,” she said to Zane. “I didn’t feel like it was connected with what was going on in the world in that moment.”
