Lolli Wren ‘are we alright?’ – out now!

“Are we alright?” It’s a simple question, but in Lolli Wren’s hands, it becomes something considerably more ominous. The London avant-pop artist’s latest single takes the anxieties of modern life and blows them up to cinematic proportions, creating a dark, ambitious track about doomscrolling, isolation and the creeping feeling that something has gone seriously wrong.

Wren is hardly new to making an entrance. Alongside her work as an artist, composer, vocalist and producer, she’s built a huge online audience as the “Fairy Voice Mother”, analysing and recreating the techniques of some of music’s biggest vocalists. With more than 375,000 YouTube subscribers and 51 million views, she’s already demonstrated just how far her obsession with the human voice can travel.

Now that obsession becomes the centrepiece of ‘are we alright?’. Wren’s vocals are everywhere, shifting between distortion, agility, layered harmonies and more elaborate choral textures. With a range of more than four octaves, she has plenty of technical firepower, but the impressive thing is how little the song feels like a vocal exercise. Every layer serves the atmosphere, turning the voice into another piece of the story.

The story itself is bleakly familiar. We live permanently online, endlessly absorbing crises, outrage and bad news, while simultaneously navigating increasingly lonely cities and mounting economic pressure. Wren draws on They Live, John Carpenter’s cult 1988 sci-fi film, for inspiration, and the connection is obvious. Like that film, the track creates the sensation that the world around us is hiding something, even if we cannot quite articulate what it is.

There is also something refreshingly direct about Wren’s motivation. She describes writing the song after feeling the weight of the existential dread surrounding so many people caught in cycles of doomscrolling and urban isolation. Rather than turning that feeling into a lecture, she turns it into a gesture of solidarity. Eduardo Moreira’s production and instrumentation give the song its cinematic framework, while Wren’s self-performed backing vocals make the whole thing feel intensely personal.

‘are we alright?’ is therefore less interested in delivering an answer than in making sure the question gets asked. That’s a smart move. In a culture increasingly defined by notifications, algorithms and constant noise, sometimes the most radical thing a song can do is stop and acknowledge that we’re struggling. Lolli Wren does exactly that, building a strange, beautiful dystopian world in which being overwhelmed might finally feel like a shared experience.