For Lolli Wren, the human voice has never been simply a means of delivering a melody. It is an instrument, a character, a landscape and, increasingly, a world of its own. The London-based avant-pop artist, composer, vocalist and producer has spent years exploring just how far that instrument can stretch, first through her work as a vocal scientist and now through increasingly ambitious music of her own.
Her latest single, ‘are we alright?’, finds Wren taking that fascination somewhere considerably darker. Cinematic, experimental and deliberately unsettling, the track confronts the peculiar emotional contradiction of modern life: being surrounded by constant communication while feeling profoundly disconnected. Doomscrolling, urban isolation and the pressures of late-stage capitalism become the raw material for a song that sounds less like an answer than an attempt to make contact.
“I was feeling so heavy witnessing the ubiquitous existential dread of so many of us being trapped in a cycle of doomscrolling and urban isolation,” Wren explains. “This is a way for me to indirectly reach out to my fellow humans that might be feeling this too, to hopefully make people feel seen.”
That instinct to make people feel seen is important to understanding Wren’s work. Even at its most elaborate, there is an emotional vulnerability beneath the theatricality. Her music draws from an eclectic constellation of influences including Björk, Kate Bush, Queen, Stromae, Sleep Token and Jeff Buckley, but the ambition is not simply to demonstrate how many musical worlds she can inhabit. It is to use those worlds as a language for emotions that can be difficult to articulate directly.
On ‘are we alright?’, that language is particularly vocal. Wren’s range spans more than four octaves, allowing her to move between delicate textures, distortion, agility and dense harmonic arrangements. Every backing vocal on the track was written and performed by her, creating the sensation that an entire ensemble is emerging from one performer.
It is a natural progression for someone whose public career has already been built around investigating the possibilities of other people’s voices. As the “Fairy Voice Mother”, Wren has attracted more than 375,000 YouTube subscribers and 51 million views through her detailed explorations of vocal technique, with artists including Shakira and Ren sharing her work publicly. But ‘are we alright?’ makes the distinction between analyst and artist increasingly irrelevant. Wren is not merely studying the voice. She is using it to construct her own mythology.
That mythology is becoming increasingly expansive. Following the release of her debut album To Build A Sea in November 2024, Wren has continued developing a character-led approach to music, visual storytelling and world-building. ‘are we alright?’ pushes that universe into dystopian territory, taking inspiration from the 1988 cult science-fiction film They Live and its vision of a reality hiding something darker beneath the surface.
Eduardo Moreira, who produced the track and played the main instrumentation, provides the sonic architecture, while Barry O’Connell handles mixing and mastering. Together, they create the space in which Wren’s vocal layers can breathe, clash and multiply.
The result is an intriguing portrait of an artist refusing to separate technique from emotion. For Wren, virtuosity is not the destination. It is the vocabulary. The real subject is what that vocabulary can communicate.
And with ‘are we alright?’, the message is deceptively simple. The world feels overwhelming. Connection feels complicated. Nobody quite knows what comes next. But perhaps asking the question together is where something begins.
Instagram | Spotify | Website | PR: Danielle Holian, Decent Music PR
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