Yash’s ‘Toxic’ Gets a Sonic Fairy Tale From Composer Vishal Mishra: ‘I Understand the Language of Love’

Vishal Mishra keeps coming back to one word: honest.

Ask him about competing with streaming playlists, about his string of Bollywood hits, about writing a love song for a film soaked in violence, and the composer-singer circles back to the same idea: the music has to be true to the moment it was born from, or it isn’t worth making.

That instinct is on full display in “Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups,” Geetu Mohandas‘ gangster saga starring Yash, which arrives in theaters worldwide on Aug. 26. Mishra composed four of the soundtrack’s six songs, sharing the album with Ravi Basrur, Tanishk Bagchi and Faheem Abdullah. It’s his first collaboration with Mohandas and Yash, and he describes it as the product of a creative partnership built on trust rather than a scorecard of credits.

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“It does mark my first collaboration with Geetu and Yash bhai, and honestly, it’s not even about the number of songs,” Mishra tells Variety. “It’s about this journey we have been on for such a long time, and I am so glad that I have met collaborators who get the best out of me.”

The clearest example of that trust is “Tabaahi,” the first song released from the film and, by Mishra’s account, its emotional thesis statement. Written by Raj Shekhar with Mishra composing and singing, the track had to announce an entire cinematic world before audiences had seen a frame of the movie.

He describes it as a song about destruction dressed up as a love song, or perhaps the other way around. The scale of two people colliding, he says, mirrors the scale of the world Mohandas built on screen, and the production followed her lead instrument by instrument.

“Every beat, every instrument is synced to the frame of the visuals, which is magical,” Mishra says. “And I am just very happy to be a part of this magic.”

Mishra pushes back on the idea that romance and darkness sit at odds with each other in “Toxic.” He argues the opposite is often true, that some of the deepest love plays out in the bleakest settings, and that shaped how “Tabaahi” was built. The melody, he says, carries the heart of the song while the production carries its tension, with Mohandas and Yash giving him room to avoid anything that felt like a conventional love theme.

That same appetite for the unfamiliar drove “Waqt,” which folds an EDM and dubstep-leaning production into a traditionally romantic Hindi film melody, including an English verse. Mishra credits the film’s visual language for demanding a hybrid rather than a straightforward ballad, and singles out Yash as a creative partner who gave him the space to work through the idea slowly.

“You find magic in the spaces where nothing exists,” Mishra says. “I always believe in leaving that space, and you know, Yash bhai, I found a brother in him.”

“Toxic” also leans into the multilingual sprawl of the Indian market, releasing its songs across five languages, with the English-language “Peekaboo” pulling in collaborators from Los Angeles as well as Mumbai. Mishra estimates more than 150 people worked across the album’s various versions. Rounding out the soundtrack are “Madhosh,” composed by Bagchi, Arslan Nizami and Abdullah with vocals from Siddharth Basrur; “Chingariyaan,” sung by Jonita Gandhi; and “His Aura Hits You,” composed by Ravi Basrur with Mishra on vocals. The music is released by Zee Music Company.

Mishra arrives at “Toxic” on the back of a run that has made him one of Bollywood’s most in-demand melody writers, anchored by last year’s “Saiyaara,” whose soundtrack included the Mishra-composed “Tum Ho Toh,” written by Raj Shekhar and sung by Mishra alongside Hansika Pareek. That success builds on two earlier career peaks: “Kaise Hua,” from “Kabir Singh” in 2019, and “Pehle Bhi Main,” from “Animal” in 2023, both of which were among the biggest Hindi film songs of their respective years. He waves off the idea that hits like those create pressure.

“I really don’t think about numbers,” he says. “I feel they’re vaguely overrated and I really don’t understand that. I understand the language of love, and that’s what I believe in.”

He traces his real turning point back to “Kaise Hua,” the song he says first pulled together threads he had been composing across languages for years. Since then, his catalog has spanned the country. He says every language that belongs to India matters equally to him, and that the goal has never been about language but about reaching as many people as possible.

Looking past “Toxic,” Mishra says he is scoring his first Telugu-language film, with Vijay Deverakonda attached, alongside upcoming projects with Salman Khan, Ahaan Pandey, Sandeep Reddy Vanga and Mohit Suri, plus a slate with production banner Cine1.

“The urge of creation right now that I have has never been there like this,” he says. “I hope that I get to create even more, and I hope that I get to touch more souls and touch my fans who are like my family, in a way that it becomes a memory.”