I have a note on my phone I wrote at 2am three months ago – a name and a question mark – and it belongs to a guy I met at a rooftop party, got briefly introduced to by a mutual friend who then disappeared, and spent the rest of that night with in every sense of that phrase. We never exchanged numbers. I don’t know how we let that happen, because the version of him who looked at me like he had absolutely nowhere else to be while he peeled off my dress did not seem like someone who was planning to vanish. One minute we were in his car with the city doing that thing it does at 3am and the next I was back in my apartment with nothing except the first name I typed into my notes before I passed out because I knew my drunk brain would lose it by morning. My friend has zero memory of introducing me to anyone that night, which is her problem, not mine, because he was very real and so was every minute of what came after. The part I can’t shake isn’t even the night itself. It’s that I cannot tell you what it was about him specifically, what it was in his voice or the way he touched me or whatever the hell was happening in that car before we got there, and the not-knowing has been eating me alive for ninety days. Vydoo and Victoria Grant wrote ‘Tangled in You’ about this and I played it six times before I finished my coffee.
Stockholm-based producer Peter Björkman releases music as Vydoo and keeps himself deliberately faceless. No image, no identity, just the sound doing its damn job. Smart move when the production is this good. ‘Tangled in You’ draws from 80s synthpop and K-pop in a way that settles into you slowly with warm pulsing synths and a vocal pocket that feels expensive and unhurried at the same time. Vydoo moves across dance-pop and disco and the aesthetics of the 80s – balancing electronic production with organic elements in a way that manages to feel current without feeling anxious about it. The arrangement gives the vocals room to breathe and do what they need to do and every layer is pulling weight. I’m giving this man a slow clap.
Advertisement
Victoria Grant is the voice you’ve heard a hundred times without knowing her name. BIMM London-trained and operating out of a home studio in London that’s quietly racked up over a million Spotify streams, she’s built her whole career in the space between the song and the credit, writing and singing tracks that land for other people while her own catalog sits there doing the work. She’s got the kind of range that makes producers come back – the Ariana-to-Dua-Lipa pocket that sounds effortless because she’s spent years making it that way. The harmonies and the part of the hook that makes you feel like the song was written specifically about your life? That’s her. She’s not the one doing press runs or posting thirst traps to announce a single. She’s the reason the single was worth announcing in the first place.
Victoria delivers the first verse in territory that goes straight to the nervous system – “Your shadow dances on my wall / Soft steps echo down the hall / I reach, I reach but you’re not there / Just empty whispers in the air.” That doubled “I reach, I reach” is doing something involuntary and urgent, the body moving before the brain caught up to stop it. He’s describing a haunting, the gorgeous shit kind where someone’s absence takes up more space than their presence ever did. Then the pre-chorus drops all the hedging at once – “And I don’t care if I fall / You’re worth it all / You’re worth it all.” Repeated twice because once felt insufficient. When you’re that deep in it you don’t actually want to be talked out of it.
Advertisement
Here’s where Victoria’s delivery goes from impressive to genuinely unfair – “Tangled in you / I can’t break free / Your love’s a thread / It’s tied to me / Every heartbeat / Every sigh / Pulls me closer / I don’t know why.” Vydoo said the song is about “being deeply infatuated with someone, without really knowing what it is that pulls you in,” and the thread image delivers. Threads are delicate and absolute in equal measure. You’d hurt yourself before you’d cut it. The “I don’t know why” that closes the chorus is doing the most, because when you’re in it, the why is the least useful question you could possibly ask.
Verse two gets into gorgeous time disorientation. “The clock ticks slow but time feels fast / Moments slip like sand through glass / Your name’s a song I hum at night / It’s wrong It’s right It’s burning bright.” That last line goes somewhere visceral with the contradictions piled up together – wrong and right and burning – the actual texture of wanting someone who scrambles everything you thought you had organized. Then the bridge blows it completely open. “A spark / A flame / A wildfire now / I’d chase you anywhere somehow / You’re the storm and I’m the rain / We’re chaos wrapped inside the same.” Three lines escalating from spark to wildfire, and it happens fast because it always happens fast. “We’re chaos wrapped inside the same” might be the most accurate description of falling for someone catastrophically that I’ve encountered in a pop song, and that’s a goddamn fact.
That note on my phone is still there. It will stay there a while longer, and now it has a soundtrack. ‘Tangled in You’ understands what that note means without needing the explanation I couldn’t give anyone. Vydoo and Victoria Grant made the song for the feeling that doesn’t make sense and doesn’t need to. The pull is the pull. I’m not fighting it.
