gglum teams up with Karma Kid and Mura Masa on the emotionally charged "Tangled"

gglum, the moniker used by 19-year-old Ella Smoker, began to capture hearts aplenty last year with her lo-fi, cosy sound. With an eclectic set of songs in her pocket that range from 90s breakbeats (“Why Don’t I Care?”) to abstract pop (“glad ur gone”), her distinctive brand of expansive bedroom-pop is clear to see. “Tangled” marks a step into a bigger space - upping the ethereal atmospheres that she’s so adept at creating and pulling her sound back into its core.

The team behind the track is formidable, with Mura Masa and Karma Kid involved in production duties. Yet, despite the magnitude of these name tags, gglum’s delivery still feels gorgeously intimate – acoustic guitars, ethereal keys, understated vocals drifting through lyrical realism.

The polish is where “Tangled” really makes its statement. Every layer is intricately considered and built together and the progression of the track alludes to what gglum’s next step into the indie-pop scene could be - low-burning and building through trip-hop drum lines and swelling soundscapes. You can almost see the bedroom walls falling away and the space starting to sprawl, but there’s no pretentiousness to it; gglum’s lyricism remains grounded in snapshots of real teenage situations.

“It’s all about feeling frustrated when you feel like you're not being treated fairly and how it can affect seemingly unrelated aspects of your life,” Ella shares about the track. “I was almost looking at how one thing can cause a chain reaction that spreads into weird corners of your thoughts and behaviour. I think there was a little bit of venting of old anger involved when I was writing it.”