A Review of Lolli Wren’s New Single ‘are we alright?’
Lolli Wren Asks a Disturbing Question About Modern Life With New Single ‘are we alright?’
Are we? Lolli Wren poses the question with the full force of a four-octave voice, layered choral arrangements written and performed entirely by herself, and a cinematic production that takes the unease of contemporary life seriously rather than smoothing it into something more comfortable. Eduardo Moreira produced and performed the instrumentation. Barry O'Connell mixed and mastered. Together they have built a musical world capacious enough for the question the title asks.
'Are we alright?' emerged from Lolli's own experience of the weight that doomscrolling, urban isolation and the relentless psychological demands of late-stage capitalism collectively impose. The 1988 cult science fiction film They Live, with its vision of a hidden dystopia beneath the visible world, provided the conceptual backdrop for the song's atmosphere.
"I was feeling so heavy witnessing the ubiquitous existential dread of so many of us," she 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."
Lolli Wren is known primarily to a significant global audience through her Fairy Voice Mother persona: 375,000 YouTube subscribers, 51 million views, a vocal scientist capable of replicating hundreds of artists' techniques. Shakira and Ren have publicly shared her content. That background in analysing and understanding the full capabilities of the human voice gives her music something that most avant-pop artists cannot access: an instrument deployed with both scientific understanding and genuine artistic feeling, distortion, agility, choral layering and operatic arrangement all available and all purposeful.
Her debut album To Build A Sea, released in November 2024, has surpassed 500,000 Spotify streams. The character-driven, concept-led visual world she has built alongside it, drawing from Björk, Stromae, Kate Bush, Sleep Token, Queen and Jeff Buckley, gives 'are we alright?' its place in a larger creative architecture. The question is deliberately simple. The architecture built around it is anything but.
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