Paradise

Most songs about childhood paint it as a lost garden. "Paradise" by Jordan Rakei does something more interesting. It admits the garden was messy, loud and sometimes frightening, and then argues that it was paradise anyway, because of who was standing in it with him.

The song arrived on 30 September 2026 as the third single from Rakei's seventh album, *A Safe Place To Be Wild*, due in February 2027.^[1] Rakei introduced it himself as a nostalgic look back at his early years and at the memories shared with his brothers, whom he described as the emotional core of that period.^[5] He did not pretend the era was calm. Parts of it, he said, were chaotic, but the song keeps its attention on the bond the siblings held through it all.^[3]

Where the song sits in Rakei's story

Jordan Rakei was born in 1992 in Tokoroa, in New Zealand's Waikato region, to a Pākehā mother and a Cook Islands Māori father. The family moved to Brisbane when he was three, and he stayed in Australia until relocating to London in 2015.^[4] That early move matters for a song about brothers. A family that crosses an ocean tends to become a small closed world, and the children in it often become each other's main continuity.

His career since has been a steady accumulation of intimacy. After early EPs and the debut album *Cloak* in 2016, he signed to Ninja Tune and released *Wallflower* in 2017, followed by *Origin* in 2019.^[4] By *What We Call Life* in 2021 he was describing his own work as his most vulnerable yet, citing folk-leaning songwriters such as Joni Mitchell and John Martyn among the influences on that record.^[4] *The Loop*, his 2024 album, pushed further into life as a parent and caregiver, according to coverage of that release.^[8] "Paradise" feels like the other end of that same timeline. Having become the adult looking after someone, he turns to look at the child he once was.

A record made to feel safe

The new album's framing helps explain the song. Press material describes *A Safe Place To Be Wild* as his most instinctive and fearless record, concerned with self-acceptance, vulnerability and creative freedom.^[1] It was recorded during his time as the first Artist In Residence at Abbey Road Studios, and the period also saw him build a home studio outside London and adopt a looser way of working.^[3] A listing for the tour describes the lyrics as a kind of journal-like expression, and calls "Paradise" a deeply personal story of the love he has for his brothers.^[6]

That journal quality is the right lens. The song does not behave like a polished anthem about family. It behaves like a memory being revisited in real time, with the details allowed to be uneven.

The sound of remembering

The track opens with drums joined by mellow keys, and critics describe it as vibrant yet emotionally reflective.^[1] That pairing is the song's whole argument in miniature. The rhythm has movement and a bit of swagger, the way a childhood afternoon does, while the keys hold a softer, backward-looking glow.

Rakei's usual palette of soul, jazz and alternative R&B suits the subject. These are genres built on warmth and on the idea that feeling can be carried in a groove rather than stated outright. Nothing in the arrangement is trying to overwhelm the listener. It lets a steady pulse stand in for the reliability of siblings, who are often the people you do not have to explain yourself to.

Chaos and closeness

The most useful phrase Rakei has offered about the song is also the plainest: the chaos and the bond coexisted.^[5] That is a more honest account of childhood than either nostalgia or grievance usually manages. Many songs about growing up choose one register. They either sweeten the past or litigate it. Rakei's framing refuses the choice.

In that reading, "paradise" is not a place without trouble. It is a place where trouble could be survived together. The word becomes a judgment about relationships rather than circumstances. A cramped house, an unpredictable household or a stretch of difficulty can still be remembered as paradise if the people in it had each other's backs.

This also fits something Rakei has said elsewhere about happiness. In a Clash interview about his earlier single "Freedom," he described freedom as the absence of dread or sadness and the ability to embrace happiness.^[7] "Paradise" can be heard as the childhood version of that idea. For a while, with his brothers, the dread had somewhere to go.

From a childlike world to a harsher one

The song is not only a snapshot. Rakei has said it also touches on the move from an inner, childlike world into something harsher and more complex.^[2] That transition is the quiet engine of the piece. The word "paradise" implies a before and an after, and the song lives in the gap between them.

Listeners can hear this in the emotional texture rather than in any single moment. The warmth of the memory is real, but it is shadowed by the knowledge that it ended, as childhoods do. Growing up here is not framed as a tragedy. It is framed as a change of weather. What remains is the proof, held in memory, that closeness once existed and can be returned to.

The video as a second reading

The accompanying video was filmed in Stockwell, London, and follows the present-day Rakei alongside a version of himself at around ten years old.^[2] It does not unfold in order. It slips between memory and the present, and ordinary spaces and objects take on a dreamlike quality as the two timelines gradually blur.^[2]

That structure supports what the song implies. Memory, in the video, is not an archive. It is a place you can walk into, and the adult and the child end up sharing the same rooms. The choice of an everyday London setting rather than a fantastical one reinforces the song's modest, human scale. The paradise in question is made of ordinary things.

Why brothers, specifically

Songs about parents and romantic partners are everywhere. Songs about siblings are rarer, and that rarity is part of the appeal. Siblings are the only people who share both your starting point and your private vocabulary. They saw the same rooms from the same height, and they remember the same weather in the house.

Rakei calls his brothers the emotional core of those early years,^[5] which is a striking choice of words. It implies that the adults, the neighbourhood and the circumstances were scenery, while the brothers were the story. For a family that had crossed an ocean when he was small,^[4] that emphasis feels plausible, though the sources do not say so directly and we are inferring.

Intimacy as a method

It is worth noticing how consistent this move is within his catalogue. *What We Call Life* was framed by Rakei as his most vulnerable work,^[4] and coverage of *The Loop* describes an album that goes heart first into the stream of life.^[8] "Paradise" continues that habit of turning private experience into shared material. The difference is the direction of travel. Where earlier records often looked at the present, this song deliberately goes backward, and the emotional payoff comes from the contrast with the adult who is doing the remembering.

Alternative interpretations

Because the public statements are brief, other readings are open, and they should be treated as interpretation rather than fact. One is that the brothers function as a symbol for any chosen or inherited tribe, so the song speaks to listeners who have no siblings but did have a group that made a hard period survivable.

Another reading is parental. Rakei is now a father, and the song may be as much about what he hopes to pass on as about what he received. Looking back at siblings who shared the load can sharpen a person's sense of what a safe home needs to provide. This is speculation on our part, grounded only in the biographical fact of his family life^[4] and the album's wider interest in safety and vulnerability.^[1]

A third reading is more ambivalent. Calling something paradise while admitting its chaos can carry a tinge of loss, since the word is usually reserved for what cannot be recovered. The song may be celebrating the bond and mourning the world that held it at once.

Why it resonates

Many listeners carry a version of this story. They grew up in households that were imperfect and loving in uneven proportions, and they find that the thing they miss is not the circumstances but the company. A song that says so without sentimentality gives them permission to hold both truths.

It also arrives at a moment when Rakei is preparing his largest headline shows yet, including London's Alexandra Palace in April 2027.^[1] Success at that scale can invite a performer to stay on the surface. Choosing instead to release a song about his brothers and a ten-year-old self suggests the opposite instinct, one in keeping with an album built around being allowed to be wild and honest in a safe space.

Conclusion

"Paradise" is a small song with a generous idea. It treats childhood as something that can be both difficult and sacred, and it locates the sacred part in people rather than in places. Because only the album's full release will show how it sits among its companions, any final verdict has to wait. For now, the song's own account is enough to make a strong case: paradise was never the absence of chaos. It was the company.