Adrien Laxénaire was one of the first musicians to play in Saodaj, and when he died in February 2024 the band turned their grief into “Lodèr la Vi”. They sing it in Réunion Creole from the far end of a life: a man thanks the body that carried him as far as it could, accepts that tomorrow stops here, tells that body to dance anyway, “Dans aou mon kor / Sant aou mon lam”, before admitting he had hoped to live long enough to go grey. The chorus, which Marie Lanfroy and Jonathan Itéma wrote together like the rest of the song, keeps telling him to breathe, “Souf, souf, souf”, to take in the scent of life that gives the song its title and to hold on to it now. Their goodbye comes in the last line, where they call him Adri and leave him up on a slackline, high in the air.

Saodaj come from Réunion, the French island department in the Indian Ocean where Lanfroy was born, and play maloya, the music that Malagasy and African people enslaved on the island’s sugar plantations handed down. Lanfroy formed the band at the end of 2011, and on Lodèr la Vi, the album named after the song, Itéma, who studied Réunionese music at the Saint-Pierre conservatoire, wrote every percussion part. He, Frederick Cipriano and Zélito Deliron hold the three-beat maloya groove on the kayamb, a flat rattle of cane stems packed with seeds, the roulèr barrel drum and the sati-pikèr, while Mélanie Badal’s cello and Blaise Cadenet’s electric guitar come in over it with the distortion of alternative rock.

Buda Musique released Lodèr la Vi, Saodaj’s second album, in November 2025, and the title track came out with a video by Erika Souriguere, following clips for “Domin” and “Adyé Véli”.

Listen to “Lodèr la Vi” HERE and pick up the album via THIS LINK