Stephan Folkes’ ‘Is This Paradise’ is an Ethereal Art Form in Sonic Motion –

With a supersonically falsetto register that ricochets straight through the confines of alt-pop predictability, Stephan Folkes turned the ache of grief into a celestial rite in his latest single, Is This Paradise?. The centrepiece of his debut LP Hazard, the single opens with a melancholic whisper of piano keys before the emotional architecture is built brick by brick with soul-aching harmonies and a sense of fragility that never begs for sympathy, only understanding.

Every second of Is This Paradise? questions what we chase in our desperate reach for euphoria. Yet instead of floating in an idealised dream pop reverie, Folkes threads the sanctity of longing into his sound design, letting the absence become an instrument as much as the layered vocal work and lush cinematic flourishes. The result is less of a genre experiment and more of a lucid, artistic reckoning.

Through his aliases—The Visionist, Dream Pop King, King of Fantasy—Folkes builds emotional cathedrals. There’s a sense that he’s always had one foot in the ethereal and the other firmly planted in East London’s concrete, and that grounding is what makes his style so arrestingly human. As a self-produced artist who’s overcome more than most would in a lifetime, his defiance runs through the veins of his work with the same intensity as his falsetto.

Is This Paradise? is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify.

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Review by Amelia Vandergast