Learn English with "Ordinary" by Alex Warren

"Ordinary" is the breakout single from Alex Warren, released on February 7, 2025 through Atlantic Records as the lead single from his debut studio album, You'll Be Alright, Kid. Warren — born in Carlsbad, California, and previously known as a co-founder of the TikTok collective the Hype House — wrote the song with producer Adam Yaron, together with Cal Shapiro and Mags Duval. Critics have classified its sound as chamber pop, a lush, string-driven take on the modern piano ballad.

The song is a direct tribute to Warren's wife, Kouvr Annon. He has explained in interviews that before he found success he was living out of his car, and Annon chose to stay by his side through that uncertainty — the real relationship at the emotional core of the lyric. The couple met when they were both eighteen, and the song turns that shared history into its central story.

Commercially, "Ordinary" became one of the defining hits of 2025. It spent ten non-consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and ten consecutive weeks atop the Billboard Global 200. On Billboard's Pop Airplay chart it set an all-time record, spending sixteen non-consecutive weeks at number one and beating the thirty-year-old mark of fourteen weeks held by Ace of Base's "The Sign." In the UK it spent thirteen non-consecutive weeks at number one — the longest reign of any song so far in the 2020s — after an initial twelve-week consecutive run, the longest ever for an American male solo artist on that chart. Billboard later named it the Song of the Summer for 2025.

The single's global reach earned heavyweight certifications: three-times Platinum from the RIAA in the United States, five-times Platinum from the BPI in the United Kingdom, and Diamond certifications in Canada, France and the Netherlands. It also finished as the best-selling song of the year in Australia, Iceland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland and the UK.

The music video, released the same day as the single, also stars Kouvr Annon: Warren chases her through a series of shifting landscapes before the two end up levitating together, a visual echo of the song's promise to lift someone out of an ordinary life. The song's success carried into awards season too — Warren was nominated for Best New Artist at the 68th Annual Grammy Awards in February 2026, where he performed an orchestral version of "Ordinary" live.

In this catalogue, "Ordinary" sits among the most recent additions — a 2025 American chamber-pop ballad shaped by Warren's background in worship music, making an interesting pair with the British gospel-soul of Sam Smith's Stay With Me or the equally confessional, contemporary balladry of Benson Boone's Beautiful Things.

If you liked this, we recommend:

• Perfect — Ed Sheeran (British English, the other global wedding-ballad phenomenon)
• Stay With Me — Sam Smith (British English, the gospel-soul ballad that shares Ordinary's worship-music roots)
• Beautiful Things — Benson Boone (American English, another confessional pop-rock ballad from the same era)
• Espresso — Sabrina Carpenter (American English, the upbeat flip side of 2020s viral pop)