", "Red Wine Supernova", "Pink Pony Club", "Femininomenon", and "My Kink Is Karma" in August of that year.

[3] Following the release of Chappell Roan's single "Pink Pony Club" in 2020 and her being subsequently dropped by Atlantic Records, she and producer Dan Nigro began working on "Casual".

Yet, one week later, they texted Roan that they were seeing someone else, leaving her "devastated", and learning shortly thereafter that they had told her friend that their relationship was only casual.

Jem Aswald for Variety wrote that "Casual" was Roan's "most irresistible" single to date and likened the singer's "stately" delivery to the style of Lana Del Rey.

[1] In another positive review for NPR, Stephen Thompson also highlighted the "explicit details" of Roan's song and posited that "all the smartly phrased specifics that make "Casual" sing: the blurry images of future domesticity, the re-contextualized conversation with a relative, the eternal miscalculation of clinging to sex as a stand-in for emotional intimacy.