Yash’s ‘Toxic’ Gets a Sonic Fairy Tale From Composer Vishal Mishra: ‘I Understand the Language of Love’
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- Vishal Mishra composed four of the six tracks on the 'Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups' soundtrack — his first collaboration with director Geetu Mohandas and star Yash — sharing the album with Ravi Basrur, Tanishk Bagchi and Faheem Abdullah, released by Zee Music Company.
- Mishra describes the film's first released song, 'Tabaahi' (written by Raj Shekhar), as 'destruction dressed up as a love song,' arguing that romance and darkness amplify rather than cancel each other.
- 'Waqt' folds EDM and dubstep-leaning production into a traditionally romantic Hindi film melody and includes an English verse — a hybrid shape Mishra credits to the film's visual language rather than a conventional ballad structure.
- The 'Toxic' album spans five languages, with the English-language track 'Peekaboo' pulling in Los Angeles-based collaborators; Mishra estimates more than 150 people worked across the album's various versions.
- Mishra cites his 2019 'Kaise Hua' from 'Kabir Singh' as the song that first tied together his cross-language composing threads, a run that continued through 'Pehle Bhi Main' from 'Animal' (2023) and 'Tum Ho Toh' from last year's 'Saiyaara.'
- His upcoming slate includes his first Telugu-language film with Vijay Deverakonda, plus projects with Salman Khan, Ahaan Pandey, Sandeep Reddy Vanga and Mohit Suri, and a slate with production banner Cine1.
Why it matters: Mishra is positioning himself as a pan-Indian, multilingual film composer rather than a Hindi-Bollywood specialist — 'Toxic' alone deploys 150-plus collaborators across five languages. With his first Telugu project (Vijay Deverakonda) joining existing Hindi work with Salman Khan and Sandeep Reddy Vanga, the 'Toxic' album becomes a portfolio piece for a composer angling to define the sound of large-format Indian cinema heading into the back half of the decade.
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