Alex Warren’s stomping acoustic love song “Ordinary” is the ruling Billboard’s “Hot 100” hit of the summer, keeping Morgan Wallen and Tate McRae’s sensuous “What I Want” out of the No. 1 spot since early June. It’s a symbolic freeze-out — the Nashville bar brigand dethroned by a sentimental teetotaler from the Hype House, a pandemic-era content-creator squad whose plan to live together while making TikToks around the clock disintegrated in its titular Netflix docuseries. In Hype House, Warren stopped at nothing to boost his plateauing views, even urging longtime girlfriend and collaborator Kouvr Annon to go through with a fake wedding, knowing she pined for the real thing. The pair genuinely tied the knot in 2024, overcoming a difficult past. They lived in his car for a while early on; Warren, 24, lost his father to cancer in the late aughts and his mother to long-term alcoholism in 2021. “Ordinary” lands both as a token of the parasocial fixation on Warren and Annon — a happy ending for a couples-content duo — and as a pop phenomenon whose folky plaintiveness and holy utterances meet the ideological moment of collapsing norms and tradcath pivots. You can’t kill the big drippy ballad: Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” was a chart hit in three consecutive decades. Times get weird, and people gravitate to plainspoken feeling. Adele came to us in a recession.
But Warren’s career isn’t just another story of a scruffy singer-songwriter’s stock skyrocketing proportionately to national and global grief and stress. He used pranks and relationship antics to build a name for himself and insists that the restless, yearning comedy incarnation was a performative front — frankly, it did look like that — while this praise-pop present is truer to his heart and ambitions. “I thought if I could get the social-media thing big, then people would care about the music,” he explained in I Hope You’re Proud, a 2022 docuseries tracking the beginnings of his Atlantic Records deal. His debut studio album, You’ll Be Alright, Kid, which tacks 11 songs onto last year’s ten-track EP of the same name, looks to build on the aesthetic and narrative gains of the big single. Warren grasps the appeal of chugging torch songs like Teddy Swims’s “Lose Control” or Shawn Mendes’s “Mercy” but never matches the desperation, being just as much a descendant of heavy hitters in contemporary Christian music like Hillsong Worship and Lauren Daigle.
Fixated on angels and the afterlife, “Ordinary” and the rest of the album reach an unusual auditory crossroads after market-testing in the content mines. Warren spent years sniffing around what moves the masses, ultimately arriving at the conclusion that the Saturday date-night jam you could slip unassumingly into Sunday church-band sets dominates the day. It’s a reasonable assessment in the year Justin Bieber closed Swag singing “Lord, I lift Your name on high” on “Forgiveness” and Benson Boone exuded ex-Mormon self-discovery. In interviews, Warren, raised Catholic, shuts down insinuations that “Ordinary” might be a religious song while stressing that he tries “to bring God and biblical references” into his writing. That slipperiness is felt in debates about whether the song is blasphemous that center the single’s jealous angels and seemingly carnal begging to be smitten in the Old Testament sense: “Shatter me with your touch, oh, Lord, return mе to dust.”
Alex Warren sings like someone trying to get out of God’s way. He hits his notes and careful runs in a straightforward manner whose closest antecedents are Josh Groban and worship leaders who see a fussy run as arrogant elevation of the self. For his BBC Radio 1 “Live Lounge” cover, Warren chose Hall and Oates’s “Rich Girl,” changing the oft-misheard “It’s a bitch, girl, and it’s gone too far” line to “It’s an itch” while delicately miming the lilting Daryl Hall vocal. He wields the clean aplomb of a star of a jukebox musical; as with the aw-shucks TikToks, he gives off a feeling that he’s gifted but he’s just like you, that someone in the crowd has just been shoved into the spotlight. Bearded and mustachioed easy-listening predecessors like Oates and Michael McDonald exuded similar auras. Warren wears the connection proudly at the BBC just as he employs the same Nashville top-line songwriter, Mags Duval, who has worked with Boone and Swims. “Rich Girl” hinted at an interest in blue-eyed soul that Kid doesn’t play into. Beyond the strutting “Getaway Car” and “You Can’t Stop This,” the latter resembling and crediting Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, Warren rests in the crawl space adjoining country-rock, CCM, maudlin top-40 staples, and Lumineer-esque folk. The ever-present choir and gang vocals make softer songs sound churchy while giving bubblier numbers a cast-recording vibe. It’s too busy, like the singer is leading an ensemble. The album treats Hozier’s “Take Me to Church” as a template, echoing voices and plodding drums trained on pushing one big-hearted chorus about perseverance after the next toward a confetti-bursting climax.
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
The promise in “Ordinary” to “make the mundane our masterpiece” could pass for an overarching ethos. Warren writes most compellingly about characters who power themselves out of a rut by shifting personal trajectories step by aching step. The Jelly Roll team-up “Bloodline” pairs the Tennessee addict in recovery with the Cali 20-something whose childhood was marred by a parent’s using, approaching a “Please don’t destroy your life” message from different lived experiences. But a rote folk-pop veneer — a stomp, a clap, a mandolin, a spirited “Oh, my brother” — couches narrative heaviness in a cheeriness. It implies that Warren has reflected on how dark this music needs to be. Kid eases off the unrelenting look at mortality of his TikTok videos like “Unboxing my mom …,” in which the singer received a parcel of what he purported to be his late mother’s ashes. But going there sparingly yields the gorgeous “First Time on Earth” and “Never Be Far,” the former extending forgiveness to a family member working through generational pain and the latter revisiting teenage trauma from a place of greater peace. Though even those sound very “Ho Hey.”
Kid struggles to forge a sonic signature as unique as Warren’s history. He still wants to be your everyman; the writing, like the old videos, travels well-trod roads to that end. He loves you so much he doesn’t care if the angels are perturbed, if the sun doesn’t rise, if you’re both in your 70s. The specter of other romantics (like Ed Sheeran) who got to the idea first is often palpable. “Who I Am” muses on Warren’s career twists and influencer origins as it worries that the more he changes the more fans he stands to upset, a thought that fills your mind only when people you’ve never met become attached to online impressions of who you are. A lurid people pleaser’s lament rises to a brute-force choral “I need to let somebody down, but I’m somebody” chant that sounds like it’s O’Doul’s-ifying the “I got soul but I’m not a soldier” in “All These Things That I’ve Done” by the Killers, a more fiery star in the faith-adjacent pop-rock firmament.
Warren’s adult-contemporary instincts are head-turningly premature; this is settled-down music, spritzed with holy, humble Steven Curtis Chapman–ness. He posted a TikTok last month joking that people are surprised to hear he’s not a middle-aged man. It speaks to both a refreshing disinterest in being seen as cool and current — the idea that he doesn’t seem young would’ve stung him three years ago — and to the music tapping on ancient nerves. Driving the assumption about his age is the music sounding dated. Warren gestures at branching out with gently placed features from other genres, but the K-pop singer and actor Rosé can’t overpower the Sheeran-in-watered-down-Celtic-folk-mode energy of album closer “On My Mind.” Having managed the nigh-impossible, converting TikTok clout into wholesome goodwill in pop, the kid keeps circling themes — monogamy, mortality — he knows you care the most about, same as ever.
Sign up for The Critics
A weekly dispatch on the cultural discourse, for subscribers only.
