How do you follow a hit like “Ordinary”, the meteoric ballad that catapulted singer-songwriter Alex Warren from viral maven to headlining a sold-out Madison Square Garden? You get back in the studio and you play—not just your tried-and-true guitar and piano, but with new instruments, new techniques, new textures, new genres. You experiment because you can. WILDCHILD, Warren’s sophomore album, does exactly this: He embraces the flamboyance of disco (“EMERALD EYES”), the rafter-raising vocal might of gospel (“CRY WOLF”) and inventive takes on beatboxing and vocal percussion (“WON’T GO BACK AGAIN”) while honing his craft through sparse meditations on love, grief and growing up. Love courses through WILDCHILD, even when it’s lost. “RESCUER” pays tribute to a reviving romance, while “FINE PLACE TO DIE” literally dances through the apocalypse. Heartbreak rears its head in many forms throughout the album, too: Though Warren is happily married (to fellow social media celebrity Kouvr Annon, for whom he wrote “Ordinary”), WILDCHILD touches on the frustrations (“CRY WOLF”; “PASSENGER”) and make-or-break moments (“ONLY THING LEFT”) that threaten even the most stable of relationships. For someone who found fame sharing his life online, it’s no surprise that Warren’s found immense success by saving his most vulnerable self for his lyrics. WILDCHILD is, in this way, his most intimate self-portrait yet.