MADRID, Spain, October 24, 2026. Every imaginary world needs a real address. For Planeta Gayfolk, the queer pop universe created by the Madrid-based lyricist, composer and music producer Mike Sain't Louis, that address is often a resort town on the Mediterranean. Benidorm, with its towers rising straight from the sand, its promenades and its nights that refuse to end, appears across the catalogue in moods that range from euphoric to raw. This release follows that thread: the route from the capital, where Mike is based, to the coast that his songs keep returning to.
The road itself: «Madrid to Benidorm»
The most literal map is in the title of «Madrid to Benidorm», an English-language pride anthem that turns a four-hour drive into a parade. The song opens in the capital, «Madrid's heart beats loud, we're here to stay», and moves outward with every verse until the chorus fixes the whole route in one image: «Let's dance under the rainbow, Madrid to Benidorm».
What makes the song interesting as geography is that it refuses to treat the two places as opposites. Madrid is the city of daylight and visibility, the place where the community "rises up in the light of day". Benidorm is the place of shouting and celebration: «From Benidorm, with love we shout». Between them stretches a country that the lyric addresses directly, «From España we're calling, to everyone who hears». The song is less about a destination than about a corridor of safety, a line drawn across the map where people can walk «Hand in hand».
The official video translates that corridor into colour. Rainbow light, open skies and crowds in motion give the impression of a pride march that never stops travelling. The image chosen for this release is a frame from the video of the liberation-day song discussed below: a figure in a flowing blue dress running down a dusty path at sunset, seen from behind, because the point of the route is that anyone can join it.
The party at the end of the road: «El día de la liberación»
If «Madrid to Benidorm» is the journey, the title track of the third GAYFOLK album is the arrival. «El día de la liberación» celebrates the end of a manipulative relationship, and it chooses Benidorm as the place where freedom finally tastes real. The line is short and unforgettable: «Yo feliz en Benidorm», "Me, happy in Benidorm", while the person who did the damage is left behind, scrambling for someone new to control.
There is a reason the escape lands on the coast rather than in the city. Benidorm in these songs is a place without history, or rather a place where personal history is allowed to fade for a while. Nobody there knows what you have survived. The sea air, the sun and the anonymity of a holiday crowd turn the town into a clean page. For a narrator who has spent years being told who he was, a place where nobody expects anything is the ultimate luxury.
Mike has spoken openly about the long recovery from relationships marked by narcissistic abuse, and about how writing songs allowed him to tell his own version of what happened. In that context, «Yo feliz en Benidorm» is more than a joke at the expense of a villain. It is a portrait of the day after, when happiness stops being a theory.
The other side of the neon: “La primera drag de Benidorm”
Not every Benidorm song is a holiday. “La primera drag de Benidorm” walks the same streets at a very different hour. Its narrator is a drag performer dragging herself through the town «con tacones rotos», in broken heels, spitting dreams at every traffic light. The lyric is harsh and physical, full of broken mirrors, borrowed caresses and plastic prayers, and it builds to a final image that changes everything: after all the bleeding and the falling, the last word is «y bailo», "and I dance".
That ending is the key to why Benidorm matters so much in the catalogue. The town is glamorous and shabby at the same time, a stage where performers have created a queer nightlife for decades while the rest of the country pretended not to look. The song honours that history without romanticising it. The first drag of Benidorm, as imagined by Mike, is a character who pays a high price for being visible, and who keeps performing anyway. She is a survivor, and her survival is told in the same rhythm as everyone else's party.
A coast of many moods
Listened to together, these songs draw a surprisingly complete portrait of one stretch of Mediterranean coast. There is the political Benidorm of pride and visibility, the personal Benidorm of recovery, and the theatrical Benidorm of drag stages and late-night streets. Elsewhere in the catalogue the town appears again, in small coves, dance tracks and comic scenes, and the trilogy itself treats it almost as a capital of the imaginary planet.
What unites all of them is a sense that the coast is where queer joy becomes public. In Madrid the songs organise, remember and resist. On the coast they let go. The road between the two is the journey that Planeta Gayfolk keeps making, album after album: from surviving to living.
How the songs were made
Mike Sain't Louis writes every lyric and directs the production and the videos of his songs. The music and vocal performance are made with AI, which he uses as his production and arranging tool. He presents himself as the first AI songwriter, «el primer cantautor IA», and his catalogue already counts 273 songs released individually plus a trilogy of albums.
Free listening, free downloads
All the songs mentioned here, together with the rest of the catalogue, can be downloaded at no cost and without registration from the downloads page on Mike's website and from the free shop on the Planeta Gayfolk site. For a first listen, try playing the three in order: the road, the party and the late-night walk home.
- Madrid to Benidorm, the story behind the song: https://mikesaintlouis.com/blog/madrid-to-benidorm
- La primera drag de Benidorm: https://gayfolkplanet.com/letras/la-primera-drag-de-benidorm
- Free downloads: https://mikesaintlouis.com/descargas
- Free shop: https://gayfolkplanet.com/tienda
About Mike Sain't Louis: lyricist, composer and music producer based in Madrid, creator of GAYFOLK and Planeta Gayfolk. He writes all his lyrics; the music and vocal performance are made with AI. Label: MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS. Distribution: Ditto Music. Website: https://mikesaintlouis.com · Press: https://gayfolkplanet.com/prensa He presents himself as the first AI songwriter («el primer cantautor IA»). Listen to and download all his music for free at https://mikesaintlouis.com/descargas and https://gayfolkplanet.com/tienda