Stellar Australian rapper The Kid Laroi talks on music, tours and what’s next
At 18, Australian rapper The Kid Laroi is a global superstar in his field. So where did he come from, and where to next?
A little over two years ago, Australian rapper The Kid Laroi was sitting in his bedroom in Los Angeles when an Instagram message popped up on his phone. “You’ve got the sauce,” it read, cryptically. Laroi had found a new fan. He had the “sauce”. The swagger. The goods.
But what it really meant was that everything was about to change for the 18-year-old Indigenous rapper because the message was from music superstar Justin Bieber.
“I just remember freaking out,” Laroi says. “[I was] like, ‘Oh my God. This is the craziest shit of all time.’ I ran in to show my mum.”
By the time Bieber had slid into the rapper’s DMs, Laroi’s career was already on the rise. He had signed to Columbia Records in 2019, and the following year released mixtape F*ck Love, which received a nomination for Best Hip Hop Release at the ARIAs and reached number one on the Australian charts. But the Bieber message would take things to a whole new level.
As it happened, the Canadian singer was working on his Grammy-nominated album Justice, and a few months after reaching out, he sent Laroi another message asking if he would appear on Unstable, one of the album’s tracks. “I was like ‘Yeah, let me check my diary real quick’,” Laroi says, jokingly. “Looks like I’m free!”
The pair hit it off, and Laroi decided to approach Bieber about appearing on one of his own songs, a track he’d written six months earlier called Stay. “I was trying to figure out what I should get him on, and I thought his voice would sound really nice on Stay, so I took it into him and he was like: ‘F..k yeah, let’s do it!’”
It was an instant hit. The song reached number one in 23 countries and has been streamed more than two billion times. It also won Laroi an ARIA for Best Pop Release last year – in addition to the one he bagged for Best New Artist – and has turned him into one of the most successful Australian artists of all time. More than 45 million people listen to his music on Spotify every month.
This year, hundreds of thousands of fans will also have the chance to see him live, on his The End of the World Tour, a mammoth run of shows that will take him to Germany, Britain, Mexico and beyond. It hits Australian shores this month, before wrapping in the US in September.
For Laroi, who recently bought a home in the ritzy celeb-favoured enclave of Beverly Hills, this has been a very good year. But life started a long way from the bright lights of LA.
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Born Charlton Kenneth Jeffrey Howard, Laroi grew up in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Waterloo. His parents split when he was young, and he, his younger brother and his mum soon found themselves bouncing around from place to place, often staying at friends’ homes or in and out of state housing.
His father wasn’t around, but he grew close to his uncle, who encouraged him to pursue his dream of being a rapper. “I wanted to be 50 Cent,” says Laroi, who as a young teenager would obsessively watch the rapper’s music videos. Then in 2015, his uncle was murdered. Laroi eventually would turn the pain of that tragedy into fuel for his musical ambitions.
“Before my uncle was murdered, he would stress to me how important it was that I keep rapping and stay focused,” Laroi wrote on Twitter a couple of years ago. “When I was little I told him, ‘But I want to be like you’, to which he replied, ‘If you turn out like me, I’ll be disappointed’. Those words have stuck with me forever.”
‘There’s no secret; he just oozes talent. It’s a pleasure to watch. The fact they haven’t given him every f..king ARIA is bananas to me’
Laroi’s hopes of making it as a rapper were more than a pipe dream. He won a scholarship to the prestigious Australian Performing Arts Grammar School in Sydney, impressing administrators with his gift for lyricism. (He later would drop out after his music career began to take off). He already was performing as The Kid Laroi, a moniker inspired by his Indigenous ancestors, the Kamilaroi people, when in August 2018 he released his first EP, 14 With a Dream, which featured stellar tracks Disconnect and Blessings. That month he was named a finalist in Triple J’s Unearthed High competition, and began to build both a loyal fanbase and a reputation as one of the industry’s most prodigious talents.
Aussie hip-hop icon Briggs remembers being blown away on hearing Blessings for the first time.
“As soon as I heard it I was like ‘Who’s this kid?’ One thing I never had when I was coming up was someone in the game who was a blackfella who could guide me through this s. t. It just didn’t exist. So I reached out to him and we met a few times just before he went to the States. I was like, ‘You’re gonna be massive, man!’ But clearly he didn’t need anyone to tell him – he has songs with Bieber now!
“I’ve seen him work in the studio once or twice since, and he’s prolific. There’s no secret; he just oozes talent. It’s a pleasure to watch. The fact they haven’t given him every f.. king ARIA is bananas to me.”
It wasn’t just Briggs who noticed the young man’s talent. A new wave of rappers was rising in the US, led by the likes of XXXTentacion, Lil Peep and Juice Wrld. Known as Soundcloud rap, named for the platform they use to share their music, the genre is defined by raw, often dark lyrics laid over catchy lo-fi beats. Juice Wrld was set to head to Australia on tour when his management heard Blessings and reached out.
Laroi ended up supporting Juice Wrld on his Australian tour, and the two soon formed a close bond, working together on the track Go, which appeared on F*ck Love. The pair even shared a home in LA when Laroi first moved to the US.
Juice Wrld made little secret of his personal struggles, his lyrics laced with references to drugs and depression. And while his career was starting to take off, landing him his first US No. 1 with 2019’s Robbery, his demons were beginning to get the better of him. Later that same year, the 21-year-old overdosed on drugs while on a private jet from LA to Chicago and never regained consciousness. Laroi had lost another mentor.
The death hit Laroi hard. But in some ways, Bieber has helped fill that void as the two have grown closer, the superstar offering advice not just on Laroi’s career, but on life and handling the pressures of the spotlight.
“I’m always trying to get some knowledge out of him and he loves it when I ask lots of questions,” says Laroi. “I’m always super grateful that I have somebody like him who has been through what I’m going through – times 10.”
Laroi has also drawn inspiration from The 48 Laws of Power, a self-help book that’s long been associated with rap music. Jay-Z, Kanye West and Drake have all namechecked it in their lyrics, and 50-Cent even co-wrote a sequel with its author, Robert Greene, called The 50th Law. It’s a kind of handbook for success, based on a set of fairly Machiavellian rules for reaching your goals: “Law 1: Never Outshine the Master”; “Law 3: Conceal Your Intentions”; “Law 46: Never Appear Too Perfect.”
“Somebody showed me that book and they told me to read it when I came to LA because they said ‘You’re gonna need it coming out to this place’,” says Laroi. “They told me ‘[After] you read it, just keep it in the back of your head so you know when other people are [using it]’. LA is a scary place. There are a lot of people out here who are trying to take advantage of you to build themselves up. That’s the one thing that I dislike about it. There’s lots of great people, but it’s hard to find great friends.”
Not surprisingly, as Laroi started to gain more success, people began to come out of the woodwork, hoping to get a piece of the action.
“It feels like every day there’s a new person who knew me when I was like seven years old,” says Laroi, with a laugh. “And it’s either ‘You owe me!’ or ‘Let’s go get some lunch!’ It’s like, ‘I haven’t seen you since I was a foetus!’ ”
But for someone who is one of the most in-demand artists on the planet, his average life is fairly, well, normal. Asked what he splurges on, now that he has a little bit of cash to throw around, Laroi has to think.
“Sushi’s great,” he says. “And I’ll go to the store and buy loads of TimTams. But in terms of big purchases, I just bought a house because I feel like I need to buy a house. But I’m pretty chill. Most of my money is spent on shows, set designs and flying people out. I don’t buy a lot of jewellery or anything. So yeah. Sushi and snacks.”
There are also tattoos. All up, Laroi reckons he has seven or eight, including one inked by his friend, the US rapper Post Malone, recently. He’ll probably get more, he admits, but doesn’t have plans to follow Malone, whose forehead is famously decorated with a barbed-wire tattoo.
.@postmalone gave @thekidlaroi a tattoo while recording for his album #twelvecarattoothache! #FallonTonightpic.twitter.com/vD7hEkziks
— The Tonight Show (@FallonTonight) May 13, 2022
“I’m gonna stay away from face tats. I think that’s pretty gnarly. Not because it would hurt, but just because it’s right there,” he says, gesturing to his face. “It’s very present. But I don’t know, I can’t say what I’m going to do in 10 years.”
Amid the success and world tours, it’s easy to forget that Laroi is still 18, and when he’s not working, which is most of the time, he likes to go to Skyzone, a trampoline park in LA, or go-karting. He recently visited Disneyland for the first time with his girlfriend, the model and TikTok star Katarina Deme, along with one of his best friends, 19-year-old phenomenon Olivia Rodrigo, alongside whom he was nominated for Best New Artist at April’s Grammy Awards.
Originally planned for January, the Grammys were pushed back to April due to Covid, taking place in Las Vegas for the first time. The air was still buzzing from that incident at the Oscars, and after so many years in which awards broadcasts have slipped from unmissable to unwatchable television, it suddenly felt like anything could happen.
As soon as the red carpet began to fill, it was clear there was something different about this year’s ceremony. Not just the location, but the energy in the room. Dua Lipa, Doja Cat, Billie Eilish, Rodrigo and Laroi, his blond mop of hair dyed pink and sporting an all-black Saint Laurent tux. This year’s line-up felt fresh, young, exciting. If this was the future of music, it felt as if the industry was in safe hands.
In the end, it wasn’t Laroi’s night. Rodrigo took home Best New Artist, one of three awards she won, thanks to her smash debut, Sour. But it would be hard to look at where Laroi finds himself today and think he needs much sympathy. Three days after the Grammys, he won three awards including Song of the Year and Songwriter of the Year at the Australasian Performing Right Association awards, the most of any artist this year.
“I’m ready to come back home and I’m excited about that,” he says, of his upcoming Australian dates. “I was just talking about this the other day. The Sydney venue I’m playing [Qudos Bank Arena], the last person I saw there was Drake. So I’m f..king stoked. It’s going to be really cool.”
Because that’s the thing. The fame, the awards, the famous friends in Beverly Hills – all that stuff is nice. But for Laroi, whose talent has managed to shine through even the darkest times in his life, his focus has always been on the music. The rest is just noise.