手繰り寄せた comes from 手繰り寄せる, meaning to pull or draw something closer, often little by little. It can evoke physically gathering in a thread, which makes it especially fitting for this song's imagery of tangled and reconnected red string.
In the lyric, "手繰り寄せた愛" means the love they have drawn back toward themselves, suggesting that their relationship survived because they actively reached for it again.
The title 結び means "a knot" or "a tie", and Ayumu Imazu builds the whole song around one image: the red thread of fate. In Japanese folklore, people destined for each other are tied together by an invisible red string, and here he sings "君と紡ぐ赤い糸を" (the red thread I spin with you). The nice twist is that this thread is not perfect. It gets tangled and pulled loose, "絡まっては 解いて" (getting tangled, then untangling), and he is honest that the world the two of them make is a bit of a mess: "お世辞にも" / "綺麗とは言えない" (even to flatter it, / I can't call it pretty). The song opens with him admitting he keeps failing at the same thing, "なんて これで何回目" (how many times is this now), wishing he had just been more honest.
My favourite part is the second verse, where he decides a few loose ends are fine: "少しほつれたくらいが" / "愛しくて" (a little frayed is just / what makes it dear). Then he picks up the thread that came undone once, "一度は解けた あの糸を" (that thread that came loose once), and ties it again with a smile. The ending stacks phrases in quote marks like little moments in a relationship, from "二人の '初めまして'" (our "nice to meet you") to "'明日またね'" ("see you tomorrow") and all the way to "'来世まで'" ("until the next life"). That last one is a big promise for a pop song, and he sells it.
Ayumu Imazu was born in Osaka in 2000 and started dancing at six. At 14 he won an audition that sent him to New York in 2014 to study the performing arts, and he stayed three and a half years before coming back to Japan. He writes, produces and choreographs his own work and sings in both Japanese and English.
He made his major-label debut with Warner Music Japan in August 2021 with Juice. His January 2024 single Obsessed went viral on TikTok and Instagram, where its dance spread through challenge videos.