“Koto (Too Wrapped Up In You)” by Young Dervish doesn’t yell to be noticed. It just pulls, and before you know it, you’re tangled up in it.
The first time I heard “Koto (Too Wrapped Up In You)“, it felt like getting caught in a conversation that’s already mid-sentence — no pleasantries, no warning, just intimacy straight from the chest. Young Dervish isn’t interested in polish or performance for its own sake. Everything here sounds like it’s being held together by feeling alone — a raw, fretless guitar loop that sounds like it’s learning to walk as it goes, laced with a vocal delivery that hovers somewhere between mumbling a secret and humming into someone’s neck.
The title nods to the Japanese koto, and while the track never mimics it outright, there’s a percussive stammer in the strings that feels borrowed from it. Turns out, that’s no accident — there’s foam wedged under the strings of the fretless guitar, giving it this warped, tight resonance. It’s weirdly addictive, like listening to raindrops hit an old radiator. Minimal, but never empty. Emotional, but never cloying. The kind of love song that understands how obsession rarely sounds clean.
Sonically, this sits somewhere between the free-form freak-folk of early Devendra Banhart and the slanted, warped romance of Connan Mockasin’s indietronica — with a twist of lofi guitar nerdery that just keeps giving. What grabs me most is the hypnotic pacing. It doesn’t rush, it doesn’t bloom, it just is, circling itself like a thought you can’t quite shake. It’s one of those tracks you loop not because you didn’t get it the first time, but because it keeps changing shape the more you listen.
About Young Dervish:
Young Dervish is the moniker of Zakariya Khan, a Minneapolis-based artist whose musical path has been anything but linear. Born in Pakistan, raised in Saudi Arabia, and now rooted in the Twin Cities’ DIY scene, Khan builds and plays his own fretless guitars — a fitting tool for someone more interested in instinct than precision. After years producing and engineering for others, he turned the camera on himself in 2024, posting raw, self-recorded clips to Instagram that quickly grew into something deeper. Now, with a full-length debut on the way, “Koto (Too Wrapped Up In You)” feels like a glimpse into that process in motion: messy, mesmerising, and deeply personal.
Follow Young Dervish: