LOS ANGELES
A year ago, Alex Warren was the guy behind "Ordinary," the ballad that seemed to be playing everywhere at once — wedding first dances, gym playlists, the algorithm's favorite heartbreak song of 2025. His debut album, "You'll Be Alright, Kid," was, in his own description, the record of "a man who is broken." On Friday, Warren released the follow-up, and the title alone tells you where he's landed: "WILDCHILD," out now on Atlantic Records, is the sound of that same man trying to put himself back together.
The album's fourteen tracks move between disco flamboyance, gospel-scaled vocal runs, and stripped-down piano confessionals, but the emotional through-line is singular and deeply personal. "WILDCHILD" was his late father's nickname for him, a childhood label Warren has carried since before he ever picked up a guitar, and it anchors an album that Warren has described as an act of processing grief in real time rather than looking back on it from a safe distance.
From Broken to Healing
Warren has been candid, in the run-up to the release, about the difference between his two records. His debut, he has said, captured a man who was broken; this one is about a man who is trying to heal — not fixed, not finished, but actively working on it. That distinction matters, because "WILDCHILD" resists the easy arc of a redemption album. Songs move from the strutting confidence of "EMERALD EYES," which leans hard into disco groove, to the rafter-shaking gospel intensity of "CRY WOLF," to the percussive, beatbox-inflected experimentation of "WON'T GO BACK AGAIN" — a sequencing choice that mirrors what healing actually feels like: not linear, but circling back on itself, testing different moods to see what sticks.
The album was supported by four pre-release singles — "Fever Dream," "Fine Place to Die," "Passenger," and "Rescuer" — each offering a different facet of the record's emotional range before the full picture came into focus this week. Guest contributions from Nile Rodgers and John Mayer signal an artist reaching for collaborators who can match the ambition of the production, a step up from the more stripped-down sound of his debut.
The Song That Took the Longest to Finish
No track on the album carries more weight than its closer and title cut, "WILDCHILD," which features John Mayer on guitar and, woven into the final mix, an actual voice memo from Warren's late father. Warren has said the song was among the hardest things he has ever written, in part because he and his father never got the chance for a proper goodbye — he was nine years old when his father died, too young to understand what was happening in real time, let alone process it. Decades later, folding his father's actual voice into the closing moments of the album that bears his childhood nickname is as literal a form of closure as a piece of music can offer.
"My dad's been a huge part of my life," Warren has said of the album's emotional center, describing the writing process as something closer to therapy than songwriting — a way of working through trauma he had carried, largely unspoken, for most of his adult life. That kind of candor has become something of a signature for Warren, whose rapid rise over the past two years has been built as much on perceived vulnerability as on vocal range.
A Career Still Accelerating
It's worth remembering how quickly this has all happened. Warren, now 25, spent his early twenties building an audience online before "Ordinary" turned him into one of the definitive pop breakouts of 2025 — the kind of song that dominates not just streaming charts but wedding playlists, TikTok sound bites, and radio rotations simultaneously. Following that up was never going to be simple; sophomore albums have derailed careers built on a single inescapable single. "WILDCHILD" answers that pressure not by chasing "Ordinary" a second time, but by widening the aperture — more genres, more collaborators, more emotional risk.
Critics who have previewed the record describe it as both his most vulnerable and, paradoxically, his most joyous work yet, a combination that shouldn't work on paper but reflects something true about grief itself: that healing doesn't mean the sadness disappears, it means you learn to let other feelings back in alongside it.
What This Means for Listeners
You don't need to have lost a parent young to find something in "WILDCHILD" worth sitting with. Grief albums have become something of a genre unto themselves in the streaming era — artists using major-label budgets and audiences to work through loss in public, and listeners responding because the specificity of someone else's pain often illuminates something about their own. What sets Warren's version apart is the literalness of it: an actual voicemail, an actual nickname, an actual nine-year-old's unfinished goodbye, turned into a five-minute song that closes out a fourteen-track album about what comes after the worst thing that ever happened to you.
For an artist who broke through on the strength of a single enormous ballad, "WILDCHILD" is a statement that Warren intends to be more than a one-song phenomenon. Whether it produces another "Ordinary"-sized hit almost feels beside the point. The album's real achievement is refusing to flatten grief into a tidy pop narrative, choosing instead to let it stay messy, generous, and — in Warren's own word — trying.
"WILDCHILD" is out now on Atlantic Records.
