Alex Warren brings his song of the summer to Indianapolis

The neon yellow of the sign swaying in Section 200 caught Alex Warren’s eye, but he couldn’t quite make out the writing. Squinting was no use, so Warren asked the audience to shout out what the sign said.

The bulk of the crowd fell quiet as those closest to the sign obliged.

“KIDNEY FAILURE AND SEPSIS.”

And that’s when it all clicked.

Until about halfway through Warren’s Sept. 23 Indianapolis stop on his Cheaper than Therapy tour, I questioned the hype. Why does this guy — who seems nice enough and does have a generational voice but mostly just stood there and waved at phone cameras — have one of the biggest songs in the world and people going absolutely feral for him?

Then “kidney failure and sepsis” tied it all together. The 15-year-old kid in Section 200 holding the sign said he lost his dad to those ailments when he was nine years old, the same age Alex Warren was when he lost his own father.

Grief dominates Warren’s discography, but on his tour’s first U.S. stop after a run in Australia and New Zealand, Warren turned that grief into the great connector between himself and the sold-out Everwise crowd. The show — one of Warren’s longest sets on record at 18 songs and a solid hour and a half — ran through most of his newest album “You’ll Be Alright Kid.”

The tour will continue to 13 more cities on its U.S. leg with pop upstart Maude Latour opening. She put on an impressive, high-energy set of her own before Warren, with highlights from her newest album “Sugar Water” and other tracks.

You’d be forgiven for writing Warren off as a TikTok fluke, because he really is the blueprint for one. He came up as one of the members of the Hype House, a group of flashy teenagers who shacked up in a Los Angeles mansion together and spent their days renegading their way to viral superstardom, before venturing out of that bubble to make his own music.

Then last February, Warren released the breakout to end all breakouts. “Ordinary,” a sweeping, plucky ballad that describes his relationship as so epic that even the angels are jealous, reigned as No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for 10 nonconsecutive weeks beginning in June. The song has since waffled between No. 1 and No. 2 where it currently sits, and Billboard named it the 2025 Song of the Summer.

And yet Warren is almost the diametrical opposite of a traditional pop star, which is what makes him the perfect prototype for industry success in the modern age. He makes folky, choir-inspired music that’s closer to the contemporary Christian genre and stomp-clap-hey than to anything usually on Top 40 radio. But because his tunes provide a perfect backtrack for inspirational clips of dog adoptions or fairytale weddings, people on social media organically pushed his music to the forefront.

All this aside, Warren in a live setting is a technical marvel. He’s got a booming, soulful baritone — molasses-thick and syrupy sweet — that sounds studio-perfect on stage. Warren howled through the slower songs like “Everything” and growled on grittier, up-tempo cuts like show opener “Burning Down,” hitting everything and not once losing pitch.

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Warren was equally at home on faster blues rock-inspired songs like “Bloodline” and “The Outside” and on deep, sentimental cuts like “Catch My Breath” and “Save You a Seat.” The songs were high in energy and emotional payoff with closer “Ordinary” packing a particularly powerful punch between the elaborate stage production and the impassioned audience delivery.

That powerhouse voice is almost at odds with Warren’s easygoing, class clown personality. His onstage movement is pretty minimal, with a great backing band and stage effects punctuating the highlights for him. Imagine if the funny kid who sat next to you in Stats 101 opened his mouth and sounded like Michael Bolton. “Raise your hand if you’re a child and you’re here,” he prompted at one point, shocked at the number of hands that went up on a school night. He immediately followed that with a song about his deceased parents.

That’s the Alex Warren schtick: Bad jokes and audience banter before launching into a gut punch. He’ll wink for the cameras and shout out birthdays, then lay bare his own struggles in a deeply personal song like “Who I Am.” This mix has endeared him to an audience of mostly teenage and 20-something girls who were screaming every word back to him.

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Seriously, Everwise sounded like a sold-out NFL stadium with how fervently these fans sang along with Warren. It’s not just the TikTok success that makes him so beloved; it’s that his music touches on raw, human experiences and emotions.

The “kidney failure and sepsis” kid wasn’t the only attendee who shared a personal tragedy. Signs in the audience spoke of ex-boyfriends, dead sisters and a mom whose three-month-old son recently passed away. That fan requested Warren dedicate “Eternity,” which he wrote for the dad he lost to cancer and the mom he lost to alcoholism, to her son, and he readily accepted. That one elicited more than a few sniffles and group hugs in my vicinity.

Warren’s material can lean trite and falls into cliché more often than not, but who am I to sit here and scrutinize the nuts and bolts of songs that brought some fans to tears? Warren’s set was the platonic ideal of a live show: an audience seeing the person who changed their life right front of them.

Is Alex Warren my favorite artist? No, not really. But he plays music that’s meaningful to a whole host of people. And watching those people engage with the artist who made such a personal impact feels like live music’s whole point.

Contact IndyStar Pop Culture Reporter Heather Bushman at [email protected]. Follow her on X @hmb_1013.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Alex Warren performs ‘Ordinary,’ more in Indianapolis stop