COUCOU

JOSÉPHINE

Leña al fuego. Sesiones La Perla. Taminaka Powers. Lyrics: VillaS

Leña al fuego (La Perla)

“The Allotments” is a nocturnal return to Sydenham Hill — the place where six boys once climbed a broken fence, shared cheap cider, argued about music and politics, and promised they’d never drift apart. Twenty years later, only five come back.

After the funeral of their friend Marcus, the group climbs the hill again to spread his ashes and rediscover the place that shaped them. The allotments are still there, but changed: the fence has been fixed, the skyline is unrecognisable, the old hut leans like it remembers their names, and the bench now has a quiet partner beside it. There is no guitar on the album, in honour of the one who used to carry his everywhere.

Across twelve tracks, the album moves between present-day grief and 90s flashbacks, blending ambient-folk, soft UK electronica, gospel harmonies, wet-green field recordings, and wordless choruses that feel like voices carried on London’s night air. Memory slips, timelines overlap, and the group slowly realises that what they return to never returns the same.

This is an album about friendship, absence, and the way growing up rearranges the map of a place.
A grey-green elegy for the boys they were, the men they became, and the one who didn’t make it back.

JOSÉPHINE

Mathieu Bérubé

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