Inochka’s new single, “Intertwined,” is the auditory equivalent of noticing the dust motes dancing in a single ray of late-afternoon sun, realizing an entire day has passed you by. This is music that occupies a space, filling the quiet corners of a room with a kind of beautiful, bruised resignation. The track drifts in on a bed of lo-fi atmosphere and gentle guitar, carrying a melody that feels less composed and more remembered, like a half-recalled tune from a dream.
The central metaphor, a love that has “shattered like sugar,” is disarmingly perfect. It stopped me cold. It made me think of the extravagant sugar sculptures—the trionfi di tavola—of Renaissance feasts: intricate, magnificent structures built with the complete understanding that they would be destroyed. A fleeting spectacle of sweetness. Inochka captures that very essence—the building of something glorious that was perhaps always destined to dissolve, its memory leaving a sticky, complicated residue on everything that comes after, in the “mundane haze” of now.
The strength here is in the quiet devastation. Her vocal performance is stunning in its restraint; there’s no pyrotechnic grief, only the heavy sigh of acceptance. You can almost feel the air grow still around the speakers. The whole construction feels fragile, a temporary shelter from a loss that is permanent. They were once “like oceans steady,” but the song lives in the bewildering quiet after the tide has gone out for good, leaving strange things scattered on the shore.
What do you do with the blueprint of a life that was never meant to be built? “Intertwined” doesn’t answer; it just lets you sit with the question.
