When I think of Alex Warren, I think of COVID-19 and being trapped in my childhood home, depressed and scrolling mindlessly through social media every moment of the day—of watching the Hype House form with equal parts disgust, fascination, and, yes, maybe a little bit of jealousy. Warren might be a Grammy nominee now, but I’ll always think of him as the David Dobrik-wannabe with fluffy hair and a camera perpetually in hand: the guy who “pranked” his girlfriend (now wife) by destroying her car to surprise her with a new one, and who put her through a fake wedding—when she desperately wanted to be married for real—in order to rack up views. Warren now insists that he never really wanted the Hype House life, that he only ever wanted to be a musician and was annoyed by its content-farming mentality. “Not a lot of people even knew I was in the Hype House,” he told People earlier this year. “And I was fine with that. I loved that. I wanted to be a musician.” Six years ago, the footage tells a rather different story. In the Hype House documentary TV show, Warren was one of the most adamant advocates for content creation, spending much of the runtime dreaming up increasingly outlandish, expensive pranks in increasingly desperate bids for virality. At one point, after he insisted on scripting, lighting, and filming an apology to his girlfriend following an argument, even some of the other Hype House members became uncomfortable with Warren’s obsessive desire for views. In a 2021 conversation with Forbes about his incessant content creation and hunger for YouTube and TikTok fame, he said, “I literally cannot see myself doing anything else. This is the only thing that I genuinely love doing and makes me happy and I fiend to do it every day.” That history matters because the same mentality seems to have followed Warren into music. He has also only recently begun seriously exploring music as an art form, or even as a hobby or thing to pay attention to. Before 2025, he mostly listened to worship music, Coldplay-esque Christian rock, and, naturally, TikTok songs. As he told The Guardian last year, “I’ve been really trying to put myself out there and like other music. I’ve been listening to a lot of albums—that’s something I wasn’t doing before.” I can’t know how much Warren genuinely cares about music itself, but listening to his second album, WILDCHILD, it’s difficult not to hear the same optimization mindset that scored his career as a content creator. The songs seem less interested in what music can express than in what it can accomplish: make you feel something immediately, sound good in a TikTok clip, appeal to as many people as possible, and never risk alienating anyone. Every song on WILDCHILD sounds the same, as if someone attempted to recreate the broadest possible notion of “music” without any actual desire, skill, or intent behind it. It’s music as a series of boxes to tick off: Quieter verse into grand, swelling chorus? Check. Over-the-top crooning to simulate emotion? Check. Semi-subtle Auto-Tune? Check. Vague, often Biblical lyrics about love and loss? Check. Churchy backing vocals to make the song feel emphatic? Check. Clean, broad production to smooth over all human errors? Check. It’s paint-by-numbers music: aggressively inoffensive, utterly bloodless. When nearly every song tries to force-feed emotion through sheer grandiosity and excessive, pseudo-dramatic crescendos, the entire album is rendered flat. The bigger the songs get, the less they seem to say. But there are some moments of genuine intrigue or promise. ”ARE YOU HAVING FUN, ALEX?” is a heartbreaking voice memo of Warren’s deceased father speaking to him over melodramatic strings. If nothing else, it’s at least an experiment. “FEVER DREAM” is legitimately catchy and boasts a great pop chorus, although it feels like Warren forgot to write anything after it. But those come few and far between, and they stand out primarily because nothing else on the record does. WILDCHILD is one vast, beige swath. It takes talent to make this much nothingness. There’s almost no fun to be found anywhere. It’s a drag, plain and simple. The lyrics don’t fare much better. Each line is just as hammy as the production around it, and Warren rarely seems interested in complicating the clichés he reaches for. Many of the songs are about his love for his girlfriend, but they’re all indebted to exhausted tropes. “RESCUER” retreads the “true love’s kiss” fantasy without subverting or interrogating it in the slightest, “FINE PLACE TO DIE” sees Warren vow that he’d be happy to die so long as it’s in her arms; in yet another attempt at TikTok relevancy, he has also described it is an ode to romantasy BookTok. “EMERALD EYES” has him waxing poetic about drowning in his girlfriend’s emerald eyes. Even the songs about the loss of his parents are subject to the same brand of genericism. How many times can one man invoke the metaphor of light versus darkness? The problem isn’t that Warren writes about love, grief, or faith. It’s that he seems terrified of saying anything about them that might belong specifically to him. His life has been extraordinarily specific but his lyrics rarely are—and that’s particularly frustrating because Warren has an unusually rich reservoir of material to draw from. He was kicked out of his home by his late alcoholic mother; his dad died in his childhood; he spent much of his teen years, before Hype House, homeless and squatting in cars. Then, almost overnight, he was subjected to the pitfalls of public scrutiny and fame. There’s so much that could be mined from those experiences and turned into genuinely interesting music—not because suffering automatically produces good art, but because those experiences are deeply his. Instead, WILDCHILD is grounded in an odd form of emotional anonymity, in which Warren is constantly telling us how deeply he feels without giving us much to feel with. That’s also what makes every song feel like an imitation of “Ordinary,” his hit single from last year that earned him a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist—and a spot on our Worst Songs of the Year list, where I dubbed it “the Pokémon final evolution of every song you’ve ever heard in a Forever 21 dressing room; the final boss of coworker music.” “Ordinary” isn’t merely another song in Warren’s catalog; it’s the template from which WILDCHILD appears to have been mass-produced. And why wouldn’t it be? It certainly did well enough on the charts—and Warren has always cared more about public perception and views than nearly anything else. In fact, his music on WILDCHILD has changed so little from You’ll Be Alright, Kid that I can just copy-paste my critique of his debut over to this review: “Alex Warren writes like someone terrified of alienating anyone, anywhere, ever—which, to be fair, is exactly the content creator mindset that brought him TikTok fame in the first place. Unsurprisingly, his approach to music is similar, oriented less towards expression than optimization. Forget l’art pour l’art; this is l’art pour l’algorithme—music that doesn’t want to challenge you, surprise you, or even linger in your memory; it just wants to exist everywhere, all at once, until you stop noticing it—like oxygen or gravity or clinical depression.” If anything, that critique is even more apt for WILDCHILD. For an album with the word “wild” literally in its title, Warren plays it unbearably safe. But there is some sincerity here, I think. Warren clearly wants to express and evoke emotion. The problem is that his art lives and dies by platitudes and overwrought production, only rarely venturing into specificity for fear that doing so might squander his neutral relatability—and, perhaps, that once he loses his relatability, he’ll lose his relevance. There lies the real motivation behind his music: not music itself, but relevancy. Addison Rae, Warren’s former Hype House housemate, is at least upfront about her desire for fame and the artifice of her music, and that self-awareness allows her to make genuinely fun songs. But Warren is more concerned with maximum reach and minimum risk—to turn every emotion into a climax and let the algorithm do the rest. To its detriment, WILDCHILD is just another metric to optimize. [Atlantic] Casey Epstein-Gross is Paste‘s Features Editor and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].