The Kid Laroi live review: End of the World tour starts sharp in Sydney
An exciting new era in Australian music began on Thursday night in Sydney, when one of the brightest pop stars we’ve ever seen made a triumphant return to his hometown.
An exciting new era in Australian music began on Thursday night at Qudos Bank Arena in Sydney, when one of the brightest pop stars we’ve ever seen made a triumphant return to his hometown.
The last time The Kid Laroi, 18, performed in this city, the crowd scarcely hit triple figures, and many of those watching would have known the kid personally. Now based in Los Angeles, he has swiftly become one of the biggest artists in the world, and his music is evidently connecting with young listeners in droves.
He writes songs about love and desire, heartbreak and disappointment, altered states and everyday frustrations. To millions of people under the age of 25, he’s the voice of their generation, soundtracking their lives with a rare intelligence and songwriting savvy.
So many aspects of Laroi’s story to date are remarkable, and from a distance, it has been easy to get caught up in the narrative: a talented young First Nations kid with a dream, using every tool in his belt to get heard and make that dream into a reality.
If nothing else, his ascent is proof of hard work and a hunger to succeed, for nobody can doubt that the artist born Charlton Howard wanted this. For years in interviews, he’s been speaking of his goal to make it big. Now that he’s done just that, before his own people at the start of a world tour, though, that reality will likely take some time to set in.
At several points during his 75-minute set, Laroi was visibly moved by what he saw and heard from the stage, as about 16,000 people sang his songs back to him at an astounding volume.
“I’m so happy to be home,” he said about half an hour in.
“Backstage, someone told me: ‘When you go out there tonight, every single person in the crowd is like your family.’ That really resonated with me. This is my city. This is where I’m from. You guys have seen this shit first-hand. It’s wild. Three years ago, I played a show at 263 Crown Street (Surry Hills) to maybe 150 people. I thought it was the shit: I thought I’d made it. And now I’m here: two nights in a row, sold out. This shit’s f..king beautiful.”
An Indigenous elder gave a Welcome to Country beforehand, and the headliner himself identified early on that Thursday was National Sorry Day. He mentioned the Stolen Generations – which included the Kamilaroi people of his stage name – and described it as “a day for every single one of us to reflect on how we could all play a part in coming together and closing the gap. Keep that in mind, and let’s have some fun tonight”.
What was most impressive about his set was that Laroi held our focus for almost the entire show, with few distractions.
On stage he had a DJ named TJ, who queued up the tracks while offering minimal backing vocals and crowd hype, as well as a couple of beefy security guards who stood sentry in the shadows, watching his every move for when he approached the screaming fans up front.
Otherwise, Laroi was the sole actor, and he was constantly on the move, scaling and descending a set of two mobile stairs that were reconfigured throughout the show. He started the set in a black leather jacket and black shades, before quickly revealing a white singlet underneath and then spending the final half-hour topless, his skinny frame rippling with exertion.
His distinctive voice is one of the reasons he’s ridden a rocket to global fame, and his vocal control and expressiveness was commendable throughout. As a performer, he’s no slouch, selling every note and reaching for the breadth of his wide range.
The one bum note in his production was a series of short videos stitched throughout the set on the big screens, which told a loose narrative of the artist being kidnapped by an older man and a young boy. This story was never resolved and added little to the performance, although the clips did offer the chance for him to take a quick breather between songs.
Though Laroi came up in the Sydney hip-hop scene, his music has long since transcended that genre. With a keen ear for melody and an evident knack for writing simple-sounding hooks – which is in itself one of the toughest tasks in popular music – he now happily sits astride pop and hip-hop in a confident, assured and truly global style that we’ve never seen from an Australian artist before him.
He closed his set with Stay, his phenomenally popular hit with Canadian singer-songwriter Justin Bieber, as the crowd worked itself toward a fever pitch in the clamour to sing its irresistible, explicit vocal hook (“I’ll be f..ked up if you can’t be right here”).
His sole encore, Without You, is based on a straightforward acoustic guitar chord progression and little else, with his keening voice carrying the song.
It was a remarkable way to end a career-defining performance: one young man standing shirtless with a microphone at the top of a staircase, at the beginning of a 100-date global tour titled End of the World. What it took for him to get there is extraordinary. Where he’ll go next is unfathomable.
The Kid Laroi. Qudos Bank Arena, Sydney, Thursday May 26 2022. His national tour continues in Sydney on Friday (May 27), followed by Perth (May 30), Adelaide (June 1), Melbourne (June 3-4), Brisbane (June 6-7) and Hobart (June 11).