RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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When making his new album WILDCHILD, out Friday (Aug. 28), Alex Warren had a very specific road map.
“This album was heavily inspired by my live shows,” he says in a new Billboard News interview. “Funny enough, whenever I play a show, it’s very fun and people dance, and then, all of a sudden, they cry and then they laugh. And for me, I loved that whiplash of emotions every few minutes.”
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Yet, there is still a sense of cohesion on the new Atlantic set. “You’re going to listen to the first song, the second song, and they’re going to be sonically so different, and they’re going to be so different what I’m talking about,” he continues. “But you’re going to feel like it’s still a story that you can pay attention to.”
And that story is influenced by Warren’s relationship with his parents. His father, who called him “wild child,” died when Warren was 9, but his dad comes back to life on WILDCHILD through audio snippets incorporated into the album from videos he made for Warren.
Now, Warren finds himself doing the same thing for his future children. In fact, he’d made a new video the day of the Billboard News interview. “I made a video for my kids this morning, and I don’t know why I like making videos for my kids, my future self. I just start filming them,” he says. In part, he wants to capture this time. “I was really just happy with where I am in my life right now, which is like weird to say out loud,” he says. “I just made a whole video where I was like, ‘I hope I’m a cool dad.’ It was fun.”
Warren wrote the album with the same core collaborators, Adam Yaron, Cal Shapiro and Mags Duval, who worked on You’ll Be Alright, Kid. That album, of course, included “Ordinary,” which spent 10 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 last year and was crowned Billboard ’s 2025 Song of the Summer .
He knows almost everything he does will live in that song’s shadow, given its enormous success and he’s more than OK with that. “I will never have a record as big as ‘Ordinary.’ Statistically, it’s impossible,” he says.
Several songs on the album reflect his love story with his wife, Kouvr Annon, including “Fine Place to Die” and “Rescuer,” but Warren jokes she’s grown tired of hearing about his devotion. “It’s so funny, because my wife isn’t very expressive when it comes down to these songs,” he says. “You have to think how many love songs I’ve written about this girl. Like at a certain point, she’s like, ‘All right, dude, I get it. You like me.’”
Watch the full video above.
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