Charlton Kenneth Jeffrey Howard (born 17 August 2003), known professionally as the Kid Laroi (stylised as The Kid LAROI), is an Australian singer-songwriter and rapper. He originally gained recognition from his association and friendship with American rapper Juice Wrld while he was on tour in Australia. He gained a local following before joining a partnership agreement with Lil Bibby’s Grade A Productions and Columbia Records, and attained mainstream popularity in 2021 with his collaboration with Justin Bieber on “Stay”, which charted globally at number 1 in numerous countries including his native Australia, Canada, the United States, and others.

His debut mixtape, F*ck Love (2020), peaked at number one on the Australian ARIA Charts, making him the youngest Australian solo artist ever to reach the top of the chart, and also reached number one on the US Billboard 200. Additionally, Howard’s songs “Without You” and its remix with Miley Cyrus, and his collaboration with Justin Bieber, “Stay”, reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100, with the latter peaking at number one for seven non-consecutive weeks. He also claims that he does not have a single genre and enjoys making both rap and pop music.

Howard was born on 17 August 2003 in Waterloo, New South Wales, in the inner south of Sydney. He has one brother Austin Howard. His father, Nick Howard, is a music producer and sound engineer who has worked with Australian stars such as Bardot and Delta Goodrem. His mother, Sloane Howard, was a talent manager, record label founder and music executive of Aboriginal and European descent who once managed Popstars winner Scott Cain.

Howard’s maternal great-great grandfather was a part of the Stolen Generation of children of mixed Aboriginal descent; through this ancestor he is a Gamilaraay (or Kamilaroi) man, from which he derived his artistic name “Laroi”. Howard’s father was not a consistent force in his life and his uncle became his father figure as a result.

In 2015, Howard’s uncle was murdered. Howard attributes his inspiration to succeed to avoid a fate like his uncle and make him proud. When Howard’s parents separated when he was four, his childhood became more chaotic. Howard said that sometimes his mother sold drugs to get by. At the age of seven he moved to the rural town of Broken Hill in New South Wales and lived with his mother, brother and grandparents at the time. He attended a private school, Sacred Heart Parish School, where he was a house captain and won a speaking award. After leaving Broken Hill, Howard attended another private school, Sacred Heart College in Adelaide, for a period of time until he was bullied and his mother could not afford it anymore; they moved back to Sydney in 2017.

In Sydney, Howard attended the Australian Performing Arts Grammar School on a scholarship, but he dropped out midway through year nine to pursue his international career. During this period, his family lived in a Housing Commission building in Redfern and he drifted between friends’ houses. In a 2021 interview, he explained that his mother is his best friend and he wanted to help her through their tough financial situation, so he found a part-time job at a fruit store.

In 2019, hip-hop podcast No Jumper filmed a documentary of Howard and his friends in Redfern as they describe the area as a “ghetto”. Howard detailed how he hustled to make it big outside of Australia by building international relationships and stated “I would go and wait outside hotel rooms for big artists that were coming to town. I’d try to play my music and find different ways to meet them or get backstage”. His tactics paid off when he sent a female friend on a mission to play his music to Swae Lee in a hotel. It worked: he met and later collaborated with Swae Lee.

Howard started out recording raps over beats on his mother’s phone and uploading them to SoundCloud. In an interview with Triple J, Howard stated that the first rap name he gave himself was “FC6”. In 2015, Howard formed the duo “Dream$Team” with Adelaide rapper DJ Marcus Jr. (aka LadyKiller) who became his mentor and support. The two recorded songs together and performed to local audiences as DJ Marcus Jr. guided him through promoting, recording and developing buzz.

Howard met his now collaborator, producer Khaled Rohaim, at a recording studio in Sydney. Moved by Howard’s talent and difficult living situation, Rohaim would pick Howard up from various houses that he would live in around Sydney so they could eat together and record at his rented studio in North Strathfield. Rohaim gave Howard some work writing songs for other artists. In one instance, he wrote a song that featured A Boogie and Howard snuck into the studio so he could meet him, eventually recording a song together. In 2017, Howard was signed to a development deal with Sony Music Australia. In the same year he was a co-host at the Fernside Festival hosted by Weave Youth and Community Services.