Alex Warren was homeless and sleeping in friends' cars - now he's number one

Alex Warren is on top of the world.

Ordinary, a song he wrote for his wife Kouvr after their wedding last year, is at number one in six different countries.

He has two more songs in the UK Top 40, and his UK tour has been upgraded to 5,000-capacity venues, due to insatiable demand.

Backstage at the Hammersmith Apollo, the Californian singer is endearingly, humbly bewildered by the whole thing.

"All of this is happening really quickly," he says. "I only wrote Ordinary three months ago. I'm honestly blown away."

But the 24-year-old didn't arrive out of nowhere.

He's one of the founders of the Hype House – a collaborative TikTok group who lived and worked together in the Los Angeles hills and shepherded millions of teenagers though the pandemic.

You could easily to dismiss him as yet another social media influencer trying to break into the music industry. It's an accusation he's aware of, and prepared for.

"I watched a lot of people, a lot of TikTokkers, make music and there was no meaning behind it. It was just something they decided to do," he says.

"But I wanted to write about real things. No one else can sing my songs. I don't take other people's demos. This is all mine."

Even a passing glance at his discography proves him right.

Warren's arena pop anthems are searingly honest, almost to a fault, drawing on his challenging childhood, and fairytale romance with Kouvr.

His father died when he was nine years old, after a long struggle with kidney cancer. The loss sent his mother spiralling into alcoholism, something Warren only realised when he tried to clear up one of her coffee mugs.

"It turned out to be alcohol," he says. "And the next day it was alcohol, and the next day it was alcohol, and at 4am it was alcohol, and when we were driving, it was alcohol."

When he called her out on it, the addiction turned to abuse.

"Every person struggling with addiction needs someone to blame it on, besides themselves, and I became that person," he says.

When he was 18, she kicked him out. He was broke and homeless. Friends let him sleep in their cars – never their houses, because his mum had convinced their parents he was a trouble-maker.

Around the same time, he was introduced to Instagram model Kouvr Annon by a friend on Snapchat.

"We just clicked right away," he says. "I felt I could tell her everything, just after our first conversation."

Within four months, Kouvr left her family in Hawaii, flew out to California and started living with Warren in a car.

Then, as now, they're an exceptionally cute couple – tender and funny and clearly besotted with one another. When they started posting videos of their romance online, people wanted to see more. In a span of six months, Warren gained more than a million followers on YouTube.

Combined with the prank videos he'd filmed with his friends, he built a big enough audience to start earning money.

"When I got my first cheque for $2,000 in a month, I was like, 'Holy cow, this is gonna change my life'," he recalls.

Some of that money went into the creation of the Hype House in 2019. Warren came up with the name, and moved into the property with Annon and a bunch of young internet stars like Addison Rae, Charlie D'Amelio, Chase Hudson and Thomas Petrou.

The collective introduced themselves in December 2019 with a photoshoot that mimicked Backstreet Boys video for I Want It That Way.

By the end of the day, the hashtag #hypehouse was trending, and the mansion quickly became an incubator for viral videos.

The enterprise thrived during lockdown but, as individual members signed TV deals, or grew tired of the escalating demands for content, it started to fall apart. Warren and Annon left in 2022, citing a desire to "move on to the next chapter in their lives".

Since then, rumours have swirled about behind-the-scenes drama at the house, with some members hinting at exploitation and mistreatment.

"There was falling out," Warren told the Zach Sang show in 2023. "But a lot of us signed NDAs, so no-one's going to talk about it."

He did, however, pour his frustrations into music.

"How do you sleep at night?" he sings on the angst-ridden Burning Down, a song allegedly targeted at one of the Hype House's co-founders.

"It scars forever when someone you called your friend / Shows you the truth can be so cold."

Warren says he never made money from the Hype House. What it did give him, however, was a built-in audience for his music.

"I think that's really rare," he says. "Usually, when someone goes from social media to music, they lose that fan base.

"But I think a lot of people watched my YouTube videos because they were having a rough life and needed an escape. So when I started making music about my rough life, I think they identified with it even more."

Warren dreamt of a music career long before he entered the Hype House. Back when TikTok was called Music.ally, he'd even created a burner account to share his songs.

"I didn't want to post on my main account, because I was terrified of failing," he explains.

"As a kid, people bullied me for singing and doing talent shows and dedicating songs to my fifth grade girlfriend, you know?

"So I posted on a random account I created, and I filmed myself singing on the toilet because I wanted to show I wasn't taking it seriously.

"And the next day, I woke up and had 10 million views."

His first release was 2021's One More I Love You, a song he started when he was 13 years old and coming to terms with his father's death.

"I watched my sister go to a daddy-daughter dance without her dad, and that's when I realised, 'Oh, wait, my life is different'," he recalls.

"I started mourning for the first time, and I didn't know how to process it, so I just went to the piano and played some chords. And that's kind of where I started learning how to write."

Warren's outpouring of grief is powerful in its simplicity, but it has touched people in ways he couldn't have anticipated.

"The other day, a woman wanted me to sign a Heinz Beans t-shirt," he says. "I giggled because I thought that was funny, then she turned it over, and it was the same t-shirt her son wore right before he died from cancer.

"One More I Love You was the song that she played at that funeral and the song she listened to help her get over it."

"I think that's the most powerful thing in the world."

The musician, who was raised a Catholic, believes that healing moments like those are part of God's plan for him.

"Without all the loss, all the trauma, all the things in my life, I wouldn't have these songs. I wouldn't have the means to help the 5,000 people coming to the show tonight, I wouldn't be able to provide for my future family with my wife.

"And I think those are all things that are meant to happen, or can happen if I make the right choices.

"You know, I could have chosen to get into drugs and be a bad person but I chose this path.

"It's the craziest thing."