London’s Lolli Wren has never seemed particularly interested in keeping things simple. An artist, composer, vocalist and producer with a fascination for the theatrical possibilities of the human voice, she returns with ‘are we alright?’, a shadowy piece of avant-pop that turns the anxieties of modern existence into something visceral. It is a song born from the strange contradiction of contemporary life: we have never been more connected, yet isolation has rarely felt so pervasive.

From its cinematic atmosphere onwards, ‘are we alright?’ feels less like a conventional pop single and more like a transmission from a world that has gone subtly wrong. Experimental, progressive and art-pop sensibilities collide as Lolli builds a dystopian landscape around a deceptively straightforward question. Inspired in part by the cult 1988 science fiction film They Live, the track carries that same sense of uncovering something unsettling beneath the surface of everyday life.

There is a particular potency to the song’s subject matter. Doomscrolling, urban alienation and the psychological pressures of late-stage capitalism have become almost banal parts of modern conversation, but Lolli approaches them through feeling rather than diagnosis. The result is music that captures the weight of staring at an endless stream of bad news while knowing there is no obvious point at which to look away.

Her voice is the central force. With a range spanning more than four octaves, Lolli has developed a reputation for treating vocals as an entire musical ecosystem, and here she pushes that philosophy further. Distortion, agility, layered harmonies and choral textures swirl around one another, with every backing vocal written and performed by the artist herself. The effect is simultaneously intimate and enormous, as though a multitude of voices are emerging from a single consciousness.

That approach makes sense given Lolli’s history as the “Fairy Voice Mother”, the vocal scientist whose analyses of famous singers have attracted more than 375,000 YouTube subscribers and 51 million views. Yet ‘are we alright?’ demonstrates that her fascination with voice is not merely technical. Here, vocal experimentation becomes character, atmosphere and narrative, giving the track a distinctly theatrical quality. Eduardo Moreira’s production and instrumentation provide the architecture, while Barry O’Connell’s mix and master allow its many layers to retain their cinematic scale.

Ultimately, ‘are we alright?’ does not attempt to solve the crisis it describes. Instead, Lolli Wren offers something arguably more useful: recognition. It is a reaching hand through the noise, a reminder that feeling overwhelmed by the world does not necessarily mean feeling that way alone. The title asks a small question, but beneath its surface sits a much larger one about what it means to remain human in an age of constant connection.

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