At 18, Alex Warren was homeless, sneaking into the gym of a gated community in his home town of Carlsbad, California, to shower for job interviews and film TikTok videos of himself singing in the bathroom. Six years later he is one of pop’s next potential superstars. His bombastic ballad Ordinary has been No 1 in the UK charts for five weeks, the longest-running chart leader this year, and entered the US Top 10 last week. As soon as he heard the finished version, he was “freaking out – my wife and I listened to it on repeat for our entire drive home, for 45 minutes.”
Ordinary may be Warren’s breakout hit but he’s been famous for a long time. He gained notoriety on social media in his teens by making hugely popular videos with titles such as “BROTHER WAKES UP IN MIDDLE OF LAKE PRANK!” In 2019 he co-founded the Hype House, a shared house of content creators (including the D’Amelio sisters and Addison Rae) known for Covid-era internet videos, as well as at least one controversial facemask-free influencer party and, eventually, a $300,000 (£226,000) lawsuit – which Warren wasn’t named in – which alleged property damage and unpaid rent.
