Most of the time Charlton Howard is singing, he’s screaming. His ragged, adolescent voice has been frequently and correctly compared to the mournful cry of Post Malone, the defining sound of zillennial heartbreak for the better part of a decade. Unlike Post Malone, who sings through a glazed, pilled-out fugue, Howard – who records as the Kid Laroi, a nod to his Kamilaroi heritage – sounds as though he’s always pushing himself to the furthest possible limits: his voice strains, the volume peaks and the spectrum of emotions he’s trying to convey melts into toxic agony.
I love this aspect of the Kid Laroi’s music: it’s what separates him from the dozens of other Post Malone acolytes populating popular music and what makes his hits so successful on a musical level. The electro-pop song Stay, his biggest hit to date, is a Justin Bieber collaboration that always feels surprisingly fast (I once heard Fox FM play it twice in a row, I assume because it only feels like the first half of a song to listen to it once), in distinct contrast to the sludgy slowcore hocked by Billie Eilish and so many other gen Z stars. The Kid Laroi sounds as though he’s tripping over himself trying to get to the finish line, kind of like the Veronicas in their heyday.
The Kid Laroi is 20, which is the perfect age to be making this kind of raw, purely adolescent music. Unlike Lorde, who about the same age was making literary, wise-beyond-her-years songs written from the lonely edge of a house party, the Kid Laroi’s songs sound like vitriolic text threads, delivered with a spray of blood and spittle.
Sorry, the opening track of his debut album, The First Time, is a little hard to listen to, like a particularly bitter voice note: “Fucked up, in pain / Why the fuck I spend 150 on this plane? / Why the fuck I spend 260 on these chains? / How am I so paranoid I bulletproof my range? / Shit don’t make no sense / I mean, the pressure’s a mess / I’m 19 trying to navigate money and stress / Weird industry, friends and my family / life is intense / And my girl is upset cos I’m always fuckin’ working.”
He delivers those lines basically in one breath, the lush soul samples beneath doing little to soften the scorching torrent of upset. The Kid Laroi is not an artful lyricist (“Those memories we made / Are burning in my brain / And I’m stuck in yesterday,” he croons on the very next track) but The First Time often succeeds because artfulness is less a goal than massive blunt force trauma. Like many 20-year-olds, he’s angry and needy: on Where Do You Sleep? he asks a partner, plainly: “Where are you at? Who do you sleep with?” A single word switch – “where” in the song’s title to “who” in its verse – pulls the song from the realm of the moody and introspective into delightfully over-the-top paranoia.
The First Time is riven with spoken word interludes from friends and family (including Bieber) telling stories about their lives and loves which try too hard to conjure subtlety around an artist whose key strength is his lack thereof. Ditto songs such as Nights Like This and You, which deviate so far from the Kid Laroi’s established emotional palette of toxic romance and violent sensitivity that they feel totally disingenuous. It’s clear his taste is more wide-ranging than most populist stars but his attempts to flex that taste end up feeling – counterintuitively – anonymous.
Call Me Instead, a collaboration with the jazz pianist Robert Glasper (a favoured collaborator of artistically high-minded rappers including Kendrick Lamar and Mac Miller), ends up feeling like a bad Frank Ocean rip-off. On What’s the Move?, the Kid Laroi drafts in the Atlanta rapper Baby Drill who delivers a verse that feels disappointingly neutered when compared with his solo output.
These moments distract from the thrilling harshness that the Kid Laroi is so clearly attempting to conjure and which he so often successfully does. Between two verses on Where Does Your Spirit Go? he audibly clears his throat, a neat faux-verite moment that emphasises the intense, often hard-to-hear cadence with which he sings.
There’s not nearly enough of that bullish intensity on The First Time, and far too many songs like Too Much, an A&R-by-numbers team-up with the BTS member Jung Kook and the behemoth UK drill rapper Central Cee. A few songs later, on the zippy, immaculately titled What Went Wrong???, he more cleanly bridges heartbreak with pop aptitude, rattling off a laundry list of relationship gripes over a fizzing drill beat. It feels like the kind of song that could provide a blueprint for future Kid Laroi records that are less patchy. But I hope he keeps shrieking into the pop void.
The First Time is out now (Columbia Records)
