The Australian’s Australian of the Year: The Kid Laroi’s meteoric rise from the ‘ghetto’ to the Grammys

The rise of homegrown music sensation the Kid Laroi is a rags-to-riches tale like few others, earning him a nomination for The Australian’s Australian of the Year.

The Kid Laroi in concert. Picture: Getty Images

The rise of homegrown music sensation the Kid Laroi is a rags-to-riches tale like few others.

The Sydney-born rapper and songwriter – who was born Charlton Howard – has had a meteoric rise to the top of the music industry. Last year, he hit 60 million ­listeners on Spotify – more than Kanye West or Beyonce – and his chart-topping track Stay, on which he collaborated with Justin Bieber, has reached a staggering 1.29 billion listens on the platform.

His work has also led to him being nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist for his collaboration with Bieber on Stay and his album Justice.

What makes his rise even more astounding is that he is just 18 years old.

His musical talent has earned him the support of pop legend Elton John, who predicted that he would be “one of the biggest artists in the whole wide world”.

Ed Sheeran has also praised the newcomer’s songwriting abilities, describing him as “super, super talented”.

“We wrote a song over the internet for someone else and he is just a supreme (songwriter), his melodies are mental, his lyrics are crazy,” Sheeran said in an interview last year.

“I think it’s a joy to have someone who is 18 years old being one of the biggest artists on the planet.”

But Howard grew up far away from the glitz and glamour of red-carpet events and award nights.

The self-made success hails from Waterloo in Sydney’s inner south, an area which he has described to US media as a “ghetto”.

Through his mother’s side he can trace his Indigenous heritage to the Kamilaroi people, from which he derived part of his stage name, Laroi.

As a teenager, his family lived in Broken Hill, before relocating to public housing in Redfern, an area which he returned to in 2019 for a video interview with hip hop podcaster No Jumper. “This is what I call my home … as this has always been the place where I feel the most stable,” Howard said, as he paced the backstreets of Redfern in a hoodie.

“You’re shaped by everything, seeing different shit, I suppose, meeting different people, becoming part of a community.

“I don’t think there is any other place in Sydney that feels more like a community than this place, everyone knows each other.”

Howard’s unparalleled rise to international fame, and contribution to music has earned him a nomination for The Australian’s Australian of the Year for 2022.

Though he has relocated to the US, following the sudden takeoff of his music career, the star is still open about his enduring links to Australia and the hard work it took to get to where he is.

“It’s so cool; it’s the best thing, as it’s the only thing I love doing and the only thing I imagine myself doing my entire life,” he told American radio personality Zach Sang last year.

“I worked hard, but a lot of people work hard. I was hustling to make it happen too. I would do stuff like wait out the front of celebrity’s hotels. And me and Mum were up late at night searching on the internet to find the number for Young Money, that was my dream to be signed by them.”

We encourage our readers to put in a nomination for The Australian’s Australian of the Year, which was first won in 1971 by economist HC “Nugget” Coombs. Prominent Australians can be nominated by filling out the form above, or sending an email to [e-mail]. Nominations close on Friday, January 21.