“DO YOU FEEL ALIVE?” By Will Sims

In the sprawling, hybrid-pop world of modern music, few artists juggle such a kaleidoscope of influences with the level of honest abandon displayed by Will Sims. With the arrival of his long-gestated debut album, “Do You Feel Alive?,” the Baltimore-based singer-songwriter and restless genre-vagabond steps forward bearing a raw, transportive, and inward-looking body of work a decade in the making. Recorded and produced with trusted co-conspirator Tony Correlli at Deep End Studio, the record amounts to more than a string of tunes: it is a living record of artistic stubbornness, restless evolution, and hard-won survival.

Spanning just seven tracks, “Do You Feel Alive?” darts through Alternative Rock, Pop, Ska, Industrial, Funk, and EDM while remaining anchored in a flood of feeling. From the opening sound, the music makes clear it is not courting a single box. It instead roars in with “Full Speed Ahead,” a title that crystallizes the record’s pulse of motion and necessity. With soundtrack-ready rises and ever-shifting colors, the track first pulls us into Will Sims’ particular aural neighborhood, where grit and warmth rub shoulders, and frankness never backs away from a hook. The vocals are confident, and the production, thanks to Correlli’s sharp touch, feels alive with purpose.

Next, we drift into “Better Off Alone,” a supple, synth-drenched meditation where Sims invites doubt into the circle. The arrangement feels lit from within, the electronics drifting like ghostlight across verses that circle back on themselves, confessing to exit wounds the speaker keeps quiet. A heartbeat kicks the kick-drum, and the low-end shiver of the industrial turn he still keeps close to his chest complements rather than buries the tune. The moment is taut yet porous, a controlled bleed showing that the record has moved past sonic games and into the quiet truth the genre once promised.

“Amber Eyes” is, by gentle consensus, the record’s emotional apex. It welcomes back Lindsay Collette, whose voice once hung like gauze over the first, rough-draft version Sims sketched in 2014; she has returned to the room with him now, four years later, and the song is a new cloth. The arrangement has traded dust for velvet and sky, every swell of strings and drum echoing the ache that first drove the project. Collette’s timbre hovers above Sims like a lucid dream, bending the old ache of distance into a fresher ache of reunion. The result is a pocket symphony, a reminder that when voices meet in the narrow light of honesty, the room widens.

Midway through the album, Sims draws us into “The World Outside,” an anthem that drapes itself in Bowielike distance and brittle wonder. Slung low, the basslines puff and undulate like slow-moving nebulae, while the synth and vocal spreads pile on a velvet patina, conjuring a shade of art-rock that feels both formal and free. The words dance on the rim of confession and observation, chronicling the jagged solitude of a mind caught between screens and sirens. The song slips, a silken seam, into “Decisions, Decisions,” where guitarist Joe Ruggiero knifes the haze with a bristling, ska-hued riff that plays like a sudden burst of daylight. The drums, Jeff Gardner and Cody Cook trading thunder and rim clicks, compress nervous energy into a propulsive thrum, and the melody accelerates in wide, contagious arcs, turning the question of too many paths into a single, roaring choice.

Just as you believe you’ve felt every peak and nadir the album has to offer, Sims lands the quietly lethal “The Mourning Moon,” the set’s most introspective moment. Production recedes to a whisper, parting to make room for a room. Something between ambient hiss and low-end drone gathers like damp air, and Sims’ voice cuts through, tracing loss and the conversations you have only with yourself. Everything slows to a pace that feels both deliberate and unsteady, and the absence of color feels like its own color. The change from the songs that came before is both sudden and ceremonial, a reminder that the artist is as comfortable with ruin as with celebration. The track doesn’t just end; it settles in and rearranges the air around you, a presence that refuses to leave.

The closing track, “There’ll Be Another Time,” pairs Sims with Abbey Danna in a radiant duet that settles its listener not in sadness, but in a quiet bloom of faith. Abbey’s voice, a luminous ember, hugs each phrase and gives the record a tender farewell. The song reads like a love letter to what lies ahead, a melodic vow that tomorrow awaits. Harmonies unfurl like fresh leaves, the strings and soft percussion weave a gentle quilt, and the whole arrangement bows in gratitude for the path just travelled. “Do You Feel Alive?” is more than a collection of songs; it is a return, a bare-hearted confession, a quiet insurrection of sound. Will Sims and Tony Correlli have sculpted a record that brims with sonic color yet holds a single, beating heart. Every cut could walk alone, yet together they trace a graph of feeling that feels both uniquely personal and absurdly collective. Lindsay Collette, Abbey Danna, Jeff Gardner, Cody Cook, and Joe Ruggiero slide in and out of the canvas like brush strokes, each guest a guardian of texture and spirit, and together they make it plain this work is borne from a circle of generous, restless devotion.

“Do You Feel Alive?” is now live across Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Bandcamp, and every other outlet that matters, and you owe it to your ears to turn it up loud. Will Sims isn’t here to play the background; he’s here to flip a switch inside you, to make you feel the wild pulse of possibility. In this scorching debut, he does exactly that. Big up Will Sims for riding the wave and dropping an album that dares to celebrate every shade of freedom, every reckless idea, and every raw, open-hearted moment. Stream it, turn it inside out, and then meet him live on August 23rd at Monument City Brewing Company in Baltimore, MD, for the release show of the year. The road ahead is wide open, and with “Do You Feel Alive?” on the dash, Will Sims is already driving it straight into the future.

Written by Manuel