Alex Warren digs into his turbulent past on second album Wildchild

Alex Warren has released Wildchild, and the title is not a pose. It is the nickname his father gave him growing up, and the album is largely built around the man who gave it, who died of cancer when Warren was nine.

The 25-year-old California singer arrives at his second record from an unusual position. He had the biggest hit single of 2025 with Ordinary, a song whose title was itself a statement of principle, and whose appeal came from refusing to outsmart itself. Its hook, promising to make the mundane a masterpiece, dared listeners to roll their eyes and then made doing so feel foolish.

Wildchild inverts that. Where Ordinary was drama-free by design, this record goes looking for the turbulence in Warren's life story and does not flinch from it. Much of the album is spent singing the goodbyes he never got to say to his father.

The title track is the clearest example. It is Warren's farewell to his dad, and because his father's favourite artist was John Mayer, Warren brought Mayer in to play the guitar solo, which turns a production credit into part of the song's meaning.

Rescuer covers a different stretch of the same story. It chronicles the hard years he and his wife lived through as teenagers, including a period only a few years ago when the couple were living in his car after his alcoholic mother threw him out of the house. She died in 2021.

Warren jokes onstage that he is a two-trick pony who writes songs about his dead parents and songs about his wife, which is close enough to an accurate description of the record. Rolling Stone's review found him likeably warm and earnest even while still learning to find his voice as a songwriter, which is a fair summary of where the pop singer sits two albums in. The release is listed on the release calendar.