After a high-pressure week of meetings, management and making connections, the best way to unwind is to plug in your headphones and allow a superb selection of tunes to take your brain far away from the world of work. Enter the Walpole Weekend Wind-Down: a monthly playlist of tracks created by one of our members or partners that will help you transition into an end-of-week headspace.
For the first playlist of 2025, we asked Jo Malone London to put together a playlist that could put even the most severe case of the January blues to bed – and the perfume house didn't disappoint. Featuring toe-tapping tracks by Elton John, Duffy, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and The La's to name only four, this selection of brilliantly British bangers is sure to help any listener approach the new year with an abundance of positivity.
The playlist was created by the brand's ever-creative Fragrance and Lifestyle Expert, Emma South.
"Where the end of the working week meets the weekend is a very special place," South says of the songs she's selected this January. "Much more than a finite point in time, Friday nights have always been a feeling: the eve of something magical, filled with promise. Many of the songs chosen for this playlist play with scale to better express our sense of time, place and being. Bowie talks of 'stealing time’ so ‘we can be heroes, forever and ever – just for one day’.
"Like music, fragrance facilitates this; pressing pause, taking us great distances and letting us be whoever we want to be," she continues. "Jo Malone London has always honoured this power and works to faithfully bottle landscapes, evoke moods and memories and dress you in emotion. Wood Sage & Sea Salt whisks you to the windswept shore, breathe in the exhilaration of crashing waves or enter the room with all the drama of Pomegranate Noir.
"This is a best of British playlist just like the repertoire of fragrances at Jo Malone London, scents that celebrate the natural world with a dash of eccentricity and told in unexpected ways."
Speaking of the repertoire of Jo Malone London, it's worth noting that the brand itself has celebrated the start of 2025 by adding a new fragrance to its roster, Taif Rose Cologne Intense. Sensuous and alluring, its notes of rose, coffee and rich amber blend to create a beautifully cocooning scent – perfect for soft launching the new you of 2025.
> Enjoy the playlist below, or by clicking through to Walpole's Spotify account
