There’s a look men get when they know they’re wrapped around your finger and weirdly enjoy it. I know that look. I got it at a work event last fall from a man who had been deep in conversation with someone else for twenty minutes and found a reason to cross the room in thirty seconds. He didn’t have anything interesting to say when he got there. He just wanted to be in the orbit. I let him stay because I was bored and he was useful which is a completely valid reason to let a man exist near you. He was getting my drinks without being asked and checking the room every fucking time I stepped away. By the end of the night his face was buried between my thighs for hours and I hadn’t done a single thing except show up and be exactly who I am. Link Strummer wrote ‘Victoria’s Secret’ about the woman on the other side of that look, and I want credit for inspiring it even though we’ve never met.
The production earns every bit of the strut this song demands. It’s mid-tempo funky pop-R&B with a synth bass that sits deep in the pocket and drums that punch with the kind of 80s confidence that makes you stand up straighter. The sax and bells know when to step forward and when to get out of the way. Strummer built this shit without a label behind him and it sounds expensive in a way that has no business coming out of a bedroom in Mississauga.
Advertisement
The song opens with “I don’t want another knocking on my door / Victoria’s Secret, you make ’em” and he’s already checked out on every other option. She made that happen. The verse gets into why: “She walks like thunder / She moves like velvet / Dripping the heat of that Good Girl and that Dior / She takes me under / Don’t need no filter / Can’t even stand to look at others anymore.” Good Girl and Dior are a whole woman arriving fully assembled, and the combination made his mouth go dry and his attention go singular. You know, I’m not turned on by obsession but I am turned on by how pretty men look when they surrender to it. He handed his attention over and that’s the damn point.
This is where the devotion gets physical. “Looking like heaven under these lights / Taking your pics to war if I fight / Left me undone the second you stepped in my sight.” He’s going to war with her photograph pressed against him. Then the escalation: “I’d build you a shrine yeah I’m out of line / Half up half down I might as well die / What do they make a movie for when you’re real life.” A man who wants you badly enough starts volunteering for humiliation. That’s when it gets interesting. A man building shrines has already fucked you a thousand times in his head and decided none of it is enough. He compared her to cinema and decided cinema was the inferior option, then had the nerve to put that shit on a record.
He drops the full admission in the chorus. “No I don’t want no other knocking on my door / They could never entertain me with their show / The way that you own me / You don’t need to take off your clothes / Victoria’s Secret You make ’em wish they’re you.” “The way that you own me” is the line. He said it out loud on a goddamn track. She didn’t need to take anything off to have him sprung and completely useless to everyone else in the room. She owns him fully clothed, from across the room, by arriving the way she does, and he’s not conflicted about a single part of it. Every woman hearing that chorus gets to claim it for herself and he wrote it that way on purpose.
Advertisement
Strummer saves the best for the bridge. “The wall’s got models / But she still wins it / She walks in pink and all the angels fade away / A little taller / Just how I like it / Her look alone could put the runway in a cage.” Models on the wall. Angels dissolved. Runway locked up. The real aphrodisiac is watching guys become desperate to stay in your good graces. Her look alone made grown men useless, the kind of useless that starts in the gut and moves south before anyone’s touched anything. She walked in wearing pink and put the fucking runway in a cage and didn’t look back to confirm it. Already three conversations deep before anyone else caught up to what happened.
Link Strummer is a 22-year-old Mississauga-bred singer-songwriter who has been at this since he was literally ten years old, which is either adorable or a little unhinged depending on how you feel about child prodigies who grow up to write songs about obsession and decide that’s their whole fucking personality. Born Aish Kamil Tuli on October 3, 2003, he spent his teens releasing bedroom pop and R&B on YouTube and SoundCloud, drawing from The Weeknd and Bryson Tiller and building a small but real fanbase before getting picked up by Spinnup in 2018. Then he went through a political controversy phase, converted to Christianity in 2020, and went quiet for five years, which is the kind of backstory that either ruins an artist or gives them something worth saying. His 2025 comeback single ‘Under You’ suggests it was the latter: 80s-influenced production, emotionally loaded, and self-described as “max emotional damage,” and damn if that doesn’t land exactly the way he meant it to. ‘Picture Frame’ followed and a 2026 album is in progress. He produces, writes, performs, and does it all without a major label infrastructure behind him, which means whatever he builds from here, he built that shit himself. That’s not bravado. That’s actually kind of impressive.
That man from the work event texted me three times the following week. I answered once, which was already generous. Strummer apparently had someone like me in his orbit too, except he turned it into ‘Victoria’s Secret’ instead of a situationship, which is the smarter move by a long shot. The runway’s in a cage. She walked in wearing pink. Hell of a thing to document.
