‘London’ finds Poesie listening for something wild in the city

Poesie has spent much of her catalogue making ideas move. ‘London’ does the opposite. Her first ballad slows everything down until the city itself starts creeping into the empty spaces, leaving love, loneliness and the strange pull of urban life tangled together rather than trying to separate them.

It is a gorgeous change of pace. Dreamy guitars and warm organ surround a vocal deliberately left without backing voices, while clarinets drift around Poesie rather than simply decorating the arrangement. There is something of Jeff Buckley’s exposed yearning in the amount of air left around the vocal, while the slow, widescreen sweep can bring London Grammar to mind, but the stranger details quickly pull ‘London’ into Poesie’s own world.

‘London’ is the penultimate single from Poesie‘s second EP, Nature Mother, which arrives on 30th September 2026. It also reaches back towards ‘Hunter-Gatherer’, approaching some of the same tension between modern city life and the desire for something more instinctive from an entirely different direction.

Where ‘Hunter-Gatherer’ could put that restlessness into motion, ‘London’ sounds as though it has stopped in the street and looked upwards. The city offers abundance and isolation at once, with the song reaching for connection while surrounded by evidence of human activity. Its repeated address to London makes the place feel less like scenery than something Poesie is trying to get an answer from.

Finding the animal inside the city

The arrangement makes that conflict wonderfully strange. Instead of conventional drums, a recording of a fox mating call was manipulated into an electronic percussive pulse, bringing something feral into a song otherwise filled with manmade streets, buildings and late-night solitude. It is an inspired choice because the effect is not novelty; most listeners would never identify the original sound, but its distorted presence gives the track an uneasy heartbeat.

Sophie Kozlowska’s two clarinets give that idea another form. Their countermelodies can feel almost vocal beside Poesie’s solitary lead, at times closer to a call passing through the arrangement than a conventional instrumental part. With no backing vocals to soften the sense of isolation, those lines become a kind of company without ever removing the loneliness.

The organ reaches backwards too. Poesie previously used the instrument on ‘Curious Eve’, but here its role is warmer and less theatrical, giving the song something close to reverence without turning the city into a romantic fantasy. Love for London and resistance to it occupy the same space.

That tension is there from the structure onwards. Poesie wrote the chorus first and chooses to begin with it, so ‘London’ opens at full yearning rather than slowly working towards a confession. The effect suits a song where the feeling seems to have existed before we arrived, as though we have stepped into a conversation between Poesie and the city halfway through.

There is something especially convincing about the absence of an easy answer. ‘London’ can hold the beauty of a city at night alongside rubbish moving through the streets, isolation alongside possibility, and the urge to escape alongside genuine devotion to the place itself. The song does not need London to be beautiful or unbearable. It understands how easily it can be both.

Its final thought nods towards Samuel Johnson’s famous association between tiring of London and tiring of life, but Poesie’s relationship with the city sounds less certain than that old certainty allows. She is not tired of life. She sounds hungry for more of it, while questioning whether the city that promises almost everything can provide the particular thing she is searching for.

Within Nature Mother, that pause feels well placed. The EP is set to move from ‘London’ into ‘Circuit Break’, but this song temporarily lowers the pulse and leaves Poesie alone inside the questions that have run through her work from the beginning: how much modern life gives us, what it takes away, and why the older, stranger parts of us keep asking for something else.

‘London’ review

‘London’ is at its best when its tenderness and oddness are allowed to coexist. Poesie’s bare lead vocal gives the loneliness nowhere to hide, while the clarinets, warm organ, dreamy guitars and transformed fox call build a city that feels alive around her without becoming comforting. The result is spacious and intimate at once, with the lack of drums making its strange electronic pulse feel even more physical.

As Poesie’s first ballad, it reveals a different route to the intensity that has driven her previous releases. Nothing needs to rush. The vocal can hang in the air, the clarinets can answer from somewhere beyond it, and the refrain can keep calling out to a city that may never reply. ‘London’ understands that loneliness is not always the absence of people; sometimes it is being surrounded by millions of them and still listening for something wilder.

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