The cover art for the Kid Laroi’s debut studio album, The First Time, depicts the 20-year-old Australian rapper-singer with a scowl plastered across his face. A mask, seemingly of his own face, rests on his stomach—a symbolic gesture that suggests that he’s done hiding his true emotions and is about to start writing from, as he puts it on the semi-affecting closer “Kids Are Growing Up,” “a place that you ain’t heard about.”
Despite such assurances of changed ways, though, the 20 songs that comprise The First Time do little to suggest an attempt at musical maturation. For every genuine stab at introspection on the superficially self-analytical opening track, “Sorry,” we get at least two empty flexes about extravagant purchases or boasts about how many platinum plaques Laroi has racked up in the past year. The qualitative whiplash of “Sorry” is fairly representative of The First Time as a whole, where each awkward artistic side-shuffle forward is followed two massive steps back.
Even if the album’s prime cuts, like “Where Do You Sleep?” and “Deserve You,” aren’t exactly cutting-edge, they’re at least inoffensive. That’s something that can’t be said about the ballad “Where Does Your Spirit Go,” a cloying tribute to Laroi’s mentor, the late Juice Wrld, that overstays its welcome after about 30 seconds. Ditto for the by-the-numbers trap number “What’s the Move?,” the gaudy “Bleed,” and the schmaltzy “Call Me Instead,” a piano-driven collaboration with YoungBoy Never Broke Again at his most grating.
As on his 2020 mixtape F*ck Love, heartbreak remains the thematic crux of Laroi’s songwriting, where he portrays himself as either a sorrowfully blindsided victim or a toxic fuck-up. On “Tear Me Apart,” he drops cheap platitudes about how, while he’s admittedly in the wrong, he should still be unconditionally forgiven for his past actions.
That in and of itself wouldn’t be much of an issue if Laroi demonstrated a stronger command of pop songwriting. The First Time features some of his weakest hooks to date and a slew of songs that are so unsatisfyingly short so as to feel half-finished. Spoken-word interludes featuring guests like Justin Bieber are spread throughout the album to pad out what amounts to a couple of just-okay singles (the energetic “What Just Happened” carries a decent enough melody) and a lot of demo-grade material that should have been left on the cutting room floor.
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