Welcome to Sleeper Hit Support Group, a column diving into the song currently occupying the bottom spot of the Billboard Hot 100.

In a pop landscape that asks more questions that it answers, I'm setting out to answer three questions about each of these songs: how it got here, if the song is good, and where it's going. In this 100th spot we'll find unlikely ascents, falls from grace, and resurgences of hits from bygone eras.

Today, we're talking about "Ordinary" singer Alex Warren's new single "PASSENGER."

How did it get here?

Did you know Alex Warren has a tragic backstory? I didn't until just now. To be frank, I'm surprised neither he nor any slimy businessperson around him has vied to milk his life's tragedies.

Well, nevermind.

Alexander Warren Hughes was born exactly one year and one week before 9/11 in a beach city near San Diego, California to a Catholic family. His father died of kidney cancer when he was nine, and his alcoholic mother left him homeless after he turned 18 with no reason or advance notice. She herself died in 2021.

It was around this time when Warren met his now-wife, Kouvr (pronounced koh-ver) Annon through mutual Snapchat friends (it was 2018, after all). She moved from Hawaii to California to be with him, and stuck it out throughout Warren's homelessness, living in a van together for several months.

Warren's first claim to fame came from YouTube and posting videos of himself doing skateboarding tricks on various platforms. The TikTok embedded below is the only example I could find, but he doesn't really do any tricks??? Curious.

His YouTube career very closely mirrored that of David Dobrik, a YouTuber whose heyday spanned the late 2010s with high-energy, fast-paced vlogs of hijinks with friends/fellow YouTubers (often referred as the "vlog squad"). Warren often took a lot of flack for just how similar his videos were to Dobrik's, with many accusing him of copying Dobrik down to individual mannerisms and speech patterns.

In 2019, Warren's profile shot up after co-founding and coining the name of the Hype House, a Los Angeles content house involving 19 TikTok creators between the ages of 15 and 21. Warren and Annon were two the four that actually lived at the house full-time, alongside co-founder Thomas Petrou and creator Daisy Keech.

Among those not living in the house were the collective's biggest stars and earliest dropouts: sisters Dixie and Charli D'Amelio, and former Sleeper Hit Support Group subject Addison Rae.

Warren's time in the hype house would make him a star of two reality TV shows. The first was a 2020 AwesomenessTV-produced competition series called Next Influencer. Warren was the de facto host of the show – a strange and poorly thought-out hybrid of The Circle and Big Brother (down to the biting of the long-running Big Brother competition Hide-and-Go Veto). When contestants would win challenges on this show, their prize would often be an advice session with Alex. He would tell them some variation of "be yourself" every time. If you're bored and have 3.5 hours to kill, it's available for free on YouTube.

The second show featuring Warren was a Keeping Up With Kardashians-style show about the remaining members of the Hype House. It released on Netflix in 2022, and The Telegraph called it "the most depressing show on TV." Warren's plotline focused on his undying devotion to pranks. He claimed in the show he was spending between $50,000-$70,000 a month on prank videos, including a fake wedding he put on for Annon a few years before they'd actually get married. In her talking heads on the show, Annon explains the struggle they face as a couple where the line between content and real life is heavily blurred, making Warren out to be kind of annoying at best and downright manipulative at worst.

Warren left the Hype House just before its final disbandment in 2022. He used his uptick in clout to do what any white man would and started a podcast. Locked In with Alex Warren lasted four months.

Warren began his music career by releasing three singles about the death of his father independently in 2021. Within a couple months, he'd ink a deal with Atlantic records. Here's what the then-president of Atlantic A&R had to say about the signing:

“We were struck by Alex’s rare combination of innate talent and intense drive. He has a natural ability to bring his life story into his songwriting. What Alex has already accomplished speaks for itself; we’re thrilled to help him bring his vision to life.”

"What Alex has already accomplished speaks for itself," is ultimately code for "he has a lot of followers so he was a pretty safe bet." He put out a dramatically titled but ultimately pretty hollow 10-minute "documentary" about how his life lead him to a contract with Atlantic (I rant about it a little more behind the paywall at the bottom of this article).

"Headlights," Warren's first single under Atlantic and the nine standalone singles that came after it did not perform particularly well. The October 2024 single "Burning Down" was his first Hot 100 entry, tumbling around the bottom third of the chart for a few months, peaking at #69. While a later version of the track featuring Joe Jonas helped its relative longevity, the chart debut happened before that remix released. It's a super generic breakup song that Warren very clearly did not have his heart in considering he's currently married to the woman he's been dating since age 18.

The timeline of the release of Warren's debut record is pretty difficult to parse. You'll Be Alright, Kid was initially released as an EP in September 2024, featuring mostly previously released singles. Post-hoc, Warren's breakout hit was tacked onto the front of the tracklist, and the cover art was changed to match the single art for "Ordinary" in what seems like a bid to trick people into listening to the full EP by accident. Even before those changes were made, You'll Be Alright, Kid was more than long enough to be considered an LP, but it's likely Warren and his team were just trying to bide their time before putting out his proper debut record.

"Ordinary," Warren's runaway chart-topping hit, was dominant in a way that sent pop music fans into a tailspin. Nobody had had that big of a hit that early in their career since Olivia Rodrigo with "drivers license."

Why? There are two reasons, and they play directly into each other.

The eldest among Gen-Z are now of age to start getting married, which has triggered a flood of wedding content on TikTok. The song's vague themes of unending devotion and its altar-ready instrumentation (complete with arpeggiating harp and a gospel choir) make it uniquely suited to soundtrack that kind of content. This was evident so early on in the game that Warren put out "Ordinary - Wedding Version" less than six weeks later. It's all the same performance stems as the original, and the only differences are the removal of drums and the increased presence of piano in their wake.

Warren hammered the wedding angle home by appearing as the first-ever musical guest on the Netflix reality dating show Love Is Blind. "Ordinary" was actually pitched to Love Is Blind's music supervisor by a top executive at Atlantic. When the episode premiered, the Vice President of A&R at Atlantic told Billboard:

“Now the people know the real Alex, the musician, and now he’s getting those opportunities that we always wanted. We’re getting to do the collabs we always wanted with other artists, and we’re getting to do the shows he’s always wanted to be on. It’s all the things that when you sign an artist and you dream, those are all the things that are on the dream list. And now he’s reached the place where he gets to do all those things.”

But even the eldest members of Gen-Z are only in their late twenties, so those among them getting married are more likely to come from religious backgrounds, the youngest among them being Mormons and Conservative Protestants. Warren doesn't really name his musical influences so much as he cites worship music writ large, contributing to the appeal for young newlyweds. Christian imagery is crammed into the lyrics like a game of Madlibs: "You got me kissin' the ground of your sanctuary / Shatter me with your touch, oh Lord, return me to dust / The angels up in the clouds are jealous, knowin' we found / Hopeless hallelujah / On this side of Heaven's gate."

Evangelical Christianity, and in tandem Christian music, has regained much more influence in American culture over the past handful of years to the point where Contemporary Christian Music has crossed over into the Hot 100. While, in a metadata sense, "Ordinary" is not a part of this boom, its brushes with worship certainly added to its success. "Ordinary" was the #1 song in America for ten non-consecutive weeks last year, and did not leave the chart for a year and three months. The only thing that was able to get it removed were the newly tightened recurrence rules kicking in after Drake's triple album-bomb sent the chart into disarray (which I suppose is payback for "Ordinary" blocking "What Did I Miss?" from hitting #1 last year).

Even with the genuine momentum of the song, Warren and his team forced "Ordinary" and the full You'll Be Alright, Kid album into people's lives where they least expected. WWE used “Ordinary” to soundtrack its video tribute to Hulk Hogan following the wrestler’s death, which doesn't really make any sense considering Warren has plenty of songs about grief and loss – "Ordinary" just isn't one of them.

The day before its release in July 2025, You'll Be Alright, Kid (which at this point had become a double album) was premiered in every single Chipotle location, including international locations in Canada, The UK, and France in a first-of-its-kind brand partnership. Chipotle also introduced an "Alex Warren Bowl" (double portion of chipotle honey chicken, mild salsa, corn, and sour cream if you were wondering) ahead of the premiere.

I don't really feel one way or another about the brand partnership in a vacuum – pop stars do this kind of bullshit all the time – but I can't help but think of the tens of thousands of Chipotle workers that were subjected to that god awful record all day. Imagine a customer just cussed you out for not giving them enough cheese and this monstrosity of a song comes on immediately after. Jelly Roll is always at the scene of the crime.

The dominance of "Ordinary" on its own was enough to score Warren a Best New Artist nod at this year's Grammys. By no fault of his own, his performance was sullied by an in-ear monitor malfunction. He took it like a champ, though, eventually being able to recover by song's end.

Now, Warren is in the process of rolling out his sophomore effort, and the fate of one-hit-wonderdom is on the line. Lead single "FEVER DREAM," a half-hearted disco pastiche, has found moderate success with a #21 debut/peak and has held on the charts since its March release.

Its successor, "FINE PLACE TO DIE," did not have that same fortune, falling off the chart immediately after a #87 debut. The album, called WILDCHILD, was announced on June 3rd at a Hollywood fan event. "PASSENGER" was released the following day.

With all that said...

Is the song any good?

No, but it could be worse. Sticking with the modernized retro aesthetics that have dominated pop music this decade, "PASSENGER"'s most notable sonic moments try to pull from early-era Beatles. The ascending repetition of the word "try" in the pre-choruses are reminiscent of the repeated "I can't hide" pre-chorus of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand."

Warren's performance here is what keeps the song from falling completely flat, but there are zero interesting compositional ideas to support him. It's deeply formulaic, and the same brand of uninteresting as all those anonymous-sounding, saccharine, self-proclaimed "songs of the summer" from earlier in the decade.

To add insult to injury, the lyrics are entirely incohesive and at times don't make any sense. Take the line "We talk about things we don't wanna address / I guess I'll make room for the elephant," completely missing the point of the "elephant in the room" idiom.

The rest of the song loosely revolves around trying to get through to a partner while they're in a time of personal need, but the repeated line "Living your dream, baby, what about mine?" completely negates the rest of the song's narrative. How this got through the editorial lens of several people is beyond me.

Where is it going?

The ultimate fate of this single will give some clarity on whether Warren's career has any potential for longevity. Given the lackluster performance of "FINE PLACE TO DIE" and "PASSENGER"'s debut in the bottom spot, it's difficult to see what exactly his path forward is. While he makes it clear he's not a CCM artist and has no stated plans to lean into the genre, it may be what he has to resort to in the not-so-distant future. This new music seems to be an attempt to distance himself from those aesthetics, and the numbers are demonstrating that it's simply not resonating.

As aptly put by critic Hannah Jocelyn for Pitchfork, "From his interviews, Warren clearly thinks deeply about algorithms and audiences but also wants to express himself, and on You’ll Be Alright, Kid, these impulses hamstring each other completely."

Will Alex Warren be damned to performing "Ordinary" at brand launches and megachurches for the rest of his life? He certainly still has time to evade that fate, but objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.