Screaming Underwater

There are moments when the most urgent thing you need to say becomes physically unsayable. Not because you lack the words, but because the medium itself refuses to carry them. That is the feeling Alex Warren reaches for in "Screaming Underwater": the horror of a voice drowned by circumstance, the loneliness of being surrounded by the world and yet completely cut off from it.

Released in September 2021, the song arrived during one of the most painful stretches of Warren's young life. It is a portrait of emotional suffocation so precise and unguarded that listeners with no connection to Warren's biography still feel it as something deeply personal.

September 2021: A Season of Impossible Weight

Alexander Warren Hughes was twenty years old when he released this song. He was not yet signed to a major label. He was not yet the Grammy-nominated artist whose 2025 single "Ordinary" would sit at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for six weeks.^[1] He was a young creator navigating the treacherous transition from social media personality to serious musician, releasing independent singles and hoping audiences would hear them as something more than content.

What he was also doing, though he did not always announce it directly, was grieving. Warren's father had died of kidney cancer when Alex was nine years old.^[2] His mother struggled with addiction through his teenage years, ultimately leading to a period when Warren was effectively homeless at eighteen, sleeping in friends' cars.^[3] In late 2021, the same year "Screaming Underwater" came out, his mother died from liver and renal failure. The cruelty of the timing was compounded by what had come just before: she had gotten sober, and for about three months the two of them had been slowly, carefully reconnecting. Then that window closed.^[4]

Warren has spoken at length about the particular anguish of losing a parent twice: once to estrangement and addiction, and once to death, without enough time in between to finish the work of repair.^[4] Whether written directly in response to his mother or in anticipation of the loss, "Screaming Underwater" carries the unmistakable weight of someone who has spent years trying to communicate across a gap that will not close.

It was co-written with Jake Lawson and Zac Lawson, better known as JVKE and his brother and collaborating producer, a pair who would go on to significant commercial success of their own.^[5] The collaboration lends the track a polish that Warren's raw emotion alone might not have achieved. The song has a minimalist architecture: spare instrumentation, deliberate space, and Warren's voice left largely unadorned, which is exactly the right choice.

The Metaphor That Does the Work

The central image of the song is physically specific and emotionally universal. To scream underwater is to exert maximum effort, to empty your lungs, to do everything a scream requires, and still produce nothing that reaches another person. The sound dissolves. The urgency remains intact, but it has nowhere to go.

This is a different kind of silence than simply not speaking. The tragedy of screaming underwater is that you are trying. You are not withdrawn, not refusing to communicate, not choosing isolation. You are pouring yourself into the act of reaching out, and it is the world around you that refuses to cooperate. The water is not a metaphor for shyness or social anxiety. It is a metaphor for conditions that exist outside the narrator's control: grief, perhaps, or the numbness that settles over a person after prolonged loss, or the particular helplessness of loving someone who cannot hear you no matter how loudly you call.

Warren's lyrics do not explain the metaphor. They live inside it. The narrator describes nights that expand into something endless, a cold that is less physical than psychological, and a desperate need for something or someone to serve as a lifeline.^[6] These are not observations from a safe distance. They are reports from inside the experience, which is why the song functions as emotional testimony rather than polished pop craft.

The song's structure reinforces this claustrophobia. The verses build a world that is muted and lonely. The chorus arrives not with relief but with the full force of the desperation the verses have been quietly accumulating. When Warren gives voice to the feeling of being unheard, the musical arrangement conspires to make you feel the walls closing in rather than opening outward. It is a song that earns its emotional payoff through compression rather than explosion.

Isolation, Numbness, and the Need to Be Heard

One of the underappreciated complexities of the song is that its narrator is not describing solitude. The loneliness here is the kind that exists in the presence of others, which is a harder thing to articulate and a more common experience than most people admit.

Warren came of age in the Hype House, the TikTok collective he co-founded in late 2019 that brought together some of the platform's most prominent creators under one roof.^[2] The Hype House was, by definition, a maximally populated environment: content creators filming each other, filming themselves, surrounded by millions of followers vicariously present through the screen. Warren built an audience of somewhere between sixteen and twenty million TikTok followers during this period.^[2] And yet he has consistently described feeling profoundly alone, carrying grief that had nowhere to go in a world built entirely around surface-level performance.

"Screaming Underwater" emerges directly from that contradiction. The crowd is there. The platform is there. Millions of eyeballs are technically present. But genuine connection, the kind where someone actually understands what you are carrying, feels as distant as the surface from thirty feet below.

The emotional numbness running through the song is also worth examining. Warren describes a state of cold detachment that is less about not feeling and more about feeling too much for too long. Grief researchers sometimes call this complicated grief: the state where loss has accumulated to the point that the nervous system essentially protects itself by going quiet.^[4] Warren lost his father at nine, spent years managing a household in varying stages of dysfunction, experienced homelessness as a teenager, and was watching his mother's health deteriorate. The numbness in "Screaming Underwater" is not affectation. It is the body's honest response to a decade of accumulated loss.

From Creator to Artist: The Stakes of Being Heard

There is a meta-level to this song worth considering. Warren has described the anxiety of releasing deeply personal music to an audience that had followed him primarily as a content creator. He worried that no one would relate to what he was writing.^[6] A song called "Screaming Underwater," released by someone who built his platform on video content and social media performance, carries an additional irony: here is a person with the most sophisticated tools for reaching a mass audience, and still the authentic message threatens to get lost.

The song became one of the tracks that helped Warren prove to himself, and to the industry, that his audience would follow him into emotional territory. It exceeded several million Spotify streams as an independent release.^[6] Atlantic Records came calling in August 2022.^[1] Looking at the trajectory from this song to the Grammy nomination and Billboard number ones that followed, it is possible to see "Screaming Underwater" as the moment Warren's creative voice clarified, the point at which he stopped calibrating for the TikTok algorithm and started writing toward something more permanent.

The music video, directed by filmmaker JakeTheShooter, extends the song's visual language in a way that complements rather than overexplains the metaphor.^[7] Rather than literalizing the underwater imagery, the video grounds Warren in recognizable emotional landscapes, spaces that feel simultaneously inhabited and abandoned, reinforcing the song's central tension between presence and disconnection.

Who Is the Song Addressed To?

One of the song's productive ambiguities is the identity of the person the narrator is trying to reach. The most obvious reading, given Warren's biography, is that this is a song about the impossibility of communicating across the barrier of his mother's addiction. Addiction creates exactly the dynamic the song describes: a person you love is present but unreachable, and no amount of calling out will get through. You are both in the water, but one of you cannot hear.

But the song resists that specific reading enough to allow others. The feeling of being unheard, of exerting full effort toward connection and receiving only silence in return, maps onto grief in its purest form: the attempt to reach someone who is no longer there. It also maps onto depression, on the experience of being surrounded by people who care about you and still feeling completely sealed off from their warmth. And it maps onto the particular loneliness of the socially hyperconnected, the paradox of the person with a million followers who cannot find anyone willing to hold the weight they actually carry.

Each of these readings is valid, and none of them cancels the others. That is the mark of a metaphor that has been built with real care. The underwater scream is specific enough to feel visceral and general enough to become anybody's experience.

A Song That Outlasts Its Moment

Most songs built on TikTok momentum have a shelf life measured in weeks. They peak on a trending sound, get recycled through a thousand user videos, and then recede. "Screaming Underwater" has proven more durable than that model would predict.

The reason, almost certainly, is that it is not primarily a TikTok song. It is a song about something too large and too permanent to be exhausted by a trend cycle. Grief does not become less relevant when the algorithm moves on. Loneliness does not expire. The need to be heard is not seasonal.

Warren has said that the responses he received to songs like this one were overwhelming in their intimacy: people treating him as though he had accessed something private they had never been able to name.^[6] That is the highest compliment a confessional songwriter can receive. It means the song has crossed the gap from one person's specific pain to a shared emotional vocabulary that listeners can claim for their own use.

"Screaming Underwater" is not a perfect record. It is a young artist's work, and it shows some of the constraints of an independent release made before Warren had the full resources of a label behind him. But those constraints are also part of the song's power. The rawness is not manufactured. The urgency is not constructed for effect. This is a person at twenty years old, carrying more loss than most people accumulate in a lifetime, finding a metaphor precise enough to hold it.

The song does not promise resolution. It does not offer comfort or suggest that the screaming eventually reaches the surface. What it offers instead is recognition: if you have ever felt this way, here is the song that says so. In that sense, the song itself is the answer to the problem it describes. Warren screamed underwater, and people heard him.