“What If?” is Alexander Stewart’s second studio album following “bleeding heart” in 2024.
When Stewart announced the album on Instagram, he wrote: “this album is truly about my experience growing up the last 2 years and the difficulties i faced. i spent so much of last year second guessing my life, my career, relationships, and self worth. i was constantly asking myself what if nothing works out the way i thought it would…? but as i continued writing this album i started changing my mindset and sitting with the discomfort and realized, what if everything is working out exactly as it’s supposed to?”
Diving into the album’s songs, it is clear that Stewart is using emotions as a road map for the tracklist.
“What If?” features a collaboration between Stewart and Lauren Spencer Smith on the third track, “Friends Don’t.” While both Stewart and Spencer Smith are great artists independently, this collaboration feels distant from the rest of “What If?” However, it plays an important role in narratively laying out the first tracks of the album. “Friends Don’t” most explicitly lays out the story of the violation of a friendship while the preceding songs like “Not Ready Yet” and “Let Me In” merely just allude to this plot. It feels as though an alternative song from Stewart alone may have been a stronger selection, but given Spencer Smith’s larger audience, this could also be a marketing tactic for Stewart.
The sixth track, “Scared of Myself,” takes an emotional shift within the album. The rage of the first five tracks turns introspective and makes expert use of word painting, emphasizing the line, “My thoughts go numb.” This not only provides a bit of a reprieve from the outrage of the opening tracks but also comes on as a stark sonic contrast.
As the album progresses, the emotions continue venturing further from anger. In “Need You More,” Stewart captures the universal feeling of questioning why some people are taken from this life too soon and the grief that accompanies such experiences.
The image of a tear bookends this album. It opens with the lines, “It’s hard to say goodbye with the tears in my eyes / Dripping down to the back of my throat.” This bridges to the end of the album with the voice note at the end of “Older.” The matronly voice sounds tear strained and shares a message of moving forward despite the pain, rather than without pain. Furthermore, the pains that have caused such tears are a recurring theme throughout the album, and the highly zoomed-in photo as the album’s cover art also refracts the light off of the tear running down Stewart’s cheek.
Stewart has become more vulnerable in “What If?” as compared to “bleeding hearts,” and the album art has increased in professionalism, but at the core, the albums are quite similar. Stewart makes excellent use of the soft intro and the dramatic shift in dynamics moving into the pre-chorus, but his growing discography of music that seems to follow this same pattern is verging on a cause to question if he is capable of anything else.
On Oct. 24, the Friday after the album came out, Stewart took to Instagram to announce the “What If?” world tour. The tour will start in the United Kingdom in November and make its way to North America in the spring of 2026. Cities, venues and presale have been announced, but possible supporting acts remain unknown.
