Songfacts®:

• "Tiramisu" is a dreamy R&B song where Don Toliver uses the Italian dessert as a metaphor for the sweetness of a lover's touch.
• While he never names her directly, all signs point to Toliver's longtime girlfriend, Kali Uchis, as the song's muse. The two first connected in 2020 and got together romantically in 2021. Their collaborations have blurred the line between personal and professional ever since. Uchis even revealed her pregnancy in Toliver's "Bandit" video.
  
  On Uchis' track "Fantasy" he rapped about wanting to "start a family," while in their duet "4 Me" he flat-out sang, "I need to hold my bae, baby." By the time you get to "Tiramisu," the metaphor of love-as-dessert feels like a natural continuation of their ongoing musical diary.
• Musically, the track rests on slinky synths and jittery hi-hats courtesy of Cardo Got Wings (who helped craft Kendrick Lamar's "Euphoria" and Drake's "God's Plan") and Polo Boy Shawty, a Chicago producer making his first big splash with a major artist.
• Toliver co-wrote the song with Bbykobe, a behind-the-scenes wizard known for shaping hooks and vocal lines for the likes of Future and Metro Boomin ("Like That") and Travis Scott ("Champain & Vacay"). If the song feels sticky-smooth and hook-heavy, that's his touch.
• The video, directed by Idan Barazani and Liron Eini, doubles down on the theme, placing Toliver in a neon-lit lounge while models (Ashley Graves, Paris Petitjean, and Bryana Straker) orbit him amid dessert-inspired visuals.
• And then there's the dessert itself. Tiramisu - literally "pick me up" in Italian - is a concoction of coffee-soaked ladyfingers, mascarpone, and cocoa whose origins are fiercely disputed between Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Like most great things in Italian cuisine, no one can agree who invented it, only that life would be a lot more dull without it.
• It's worth noting: Toliver isn't the first to turn tiramisu into pop inspiration. In 2015, South Korean indie band We Are The Night released "Tiramisu Cake," a song that unexpectedly took off on TikTok in 2024, soundtracking over a million videos. For a while, it was the most-used Korean track on the platform, proof that sometimes dessert works as well in a playlist as it does on a dinner table.