Songfacts®:

• Barry Hankerson formed Blackground Records in 1993 following unsuccessful efforts to sign his niece, Aaliyah, to large record labels. The Princess of R&B remained on his label until her death in a plane crash in the Bahamas on August 25, 2001. Blackground holds ownership of the masters to her recordings, and Hankerson announced his plans for Aaliyah's first posthumous album, Unstoppable, in August 2021. He released this team-up with The Weeknd on December 17, 2021, as the project's lead single.
• The ballad contains a love-gone-wrong message as Aaliyah and The Weeknd detail a poisonous relationship. During Aaliyah's two verses, she talks about how toxic and cold their romance has become. It has deteriorated to the extent she sees no future between them, and lies awake at night, tearfully wondering where it went wrong.
• The Weeknd sums up their now-icy relationship in the chorus. He claims he should have heeded his friend's advice not to fall for his lover, and now he sees she's been poisonous all along.
• Longtime Aaliyah collaborator and friend Stephen "Static Major" Garrett originally wrote the song. The Weeknd and his frequent writing partner Belly added their input.
• DannyBoyStyles produced the song with help from Nick Lamb. The Florida-born producer helmed all 10 tracks on the Weeknd's Kiss Land album and won a Grammy for his work on its follow-up, Beauty Behind the Madness. Frequent Kanye West collaborator Mike Dean mixed the track.
• The collaboration with The Weekend was birthed when the Toronto singer contacted Hankerson out of the blue in the late 2010s. He asked if there were any tracks with an Aaliyah vocal that he could do something with. Nothing happened at the time, but when they started work on Unstoppable he remembered the conversation and reached out. "We were able to work out his schedule and get together with one of his producers, a young brother named DannyBoyStyles," he told Billboard. "After we talked, DannyBoyStyles chaperoned updating the track." The producer then flew to Canada and put The Weeknd's vocals on.
• The Weeknd previously sampled Aaliyah's 2001 single, "Rock The Boat," on his 2011 Trilogy track "What You Need." Though originally excluded from the collection, fans finally heard the recording when Abel Tesfaye reissued his House Of Balloons mixtape in spring 2021 to commemorate its 10th anniversary.