The Kid LAROI was in a state of romantic bliss when he started his second studio album. “And no words that I could say will ever explain the way I feel with you,” he sings on “I’m So In Love With You,” with the devotion of a man delivering unbreakable vows. It’s the only song that survived the purge when the newly heartbroken 22-year-old singer scrapped the entire album he’d been making, tentatively titled Watch This! In its place, LAROI recorded Before I Forget.
When he announced this 15-track album in November, he told Variety that he spent three months recording it with “a lot more direction” (read: a fresh breakup). It’s sadder and more emotional than the music he’d initially recorded, he said, which included 2025 singles “How Does It Feel?” and “She Don’t Need to Know.” Those tracks, neither of which appear on this album, were rich with personality and charm — sides of LAROI that rarely get enough play. He needs moments like that to cut through the Bieber-isms that often loom over his artistic identity.
Before I Forget is largely devoid of the feeling that LAROI could really be bringing something special to pop. It’s a melancholic record that succinctly captures his emotional turmoil in the present moment, but reveals little about what comes after his tears have dried — not just in love, but in his career.
There are moments on Before I Forget that make the case that counting LAROI out now would be a mistake. “Private” is luminous, a grooving alternative pop standout about navigating a relationship in the public eye. “Could have worked it out, ’cause I know it was bad but it could have been worse somehow,” he sings. “And everything that we built we just watched them burn it down.” LAROI steers the song with a commanding presence, bending the production to his dejected musings.
The nostalgic R&B single “A Perfect World” is LAROI’s most cutting account of the steady deterioration of a relationship and his hope for reconciliation. When he sings “Can I just be straight up?” at the start of the bridge, it’s less of a genuine question and more of a warning that he’s over talking around what’s really bothering him. “I don’t wanna talk unless you really wanna say shit.” That grit gives him an edge, something that says he isn’t just going through the motions. To his credit, “A Perfect World” is one of the few LAROI singles that feels disinterested in being a hit. It’s a song that’s more about building the narrative of the album than his position in pop. That it benefits both is a bonus.
LAROI has been sharpening his skill set since his breakout in 2020. At the time, he was still operating on the fringes of rap. The roots he put down in pop around this time positioned him as a potential successor to someone like Post Malone. They share an expert ear for saccharine cross-genre melodic structures. But LAROI seems to mistrust his own authority as an artist. When he finds these pockets that suit him best, like on the career triumph “Bleed” from his 2023 full-length debut, The First Time, or even “July” on this album, there’s a seeming reluctance to make greater investments in them. As a consequence, he spreads himself too thin trying to cover too many bases. LAROI of all trades, master of none.
“5:21AM,” for example, seems like an interlude but functions more like a disruption. It’s just over one minute in length, cutting to LAROI strumming on an acoustic guitar and wallowing through sparse production about how “it hurts so bad but you look so good.” There’s no tension, no revelation, and nothing to make up for how it deflates the momentum he’d just built with “A Perfect World.” Before I Forget staggers for a while after that. “The Moment” and “Never Came Back” are one-dimensional dissections of the same material he tackles with sharper insight elsewhere on the record.
“Thank God” is the saving grace that keeps the second half of the record grounded. There’s an urgency to the pacing of the pop-rock track that makes the stakes feel higher here. “So if you can’t then I’ll cut it/Already know I’m gutted/All that I ever wanted was you,” he sings. When a sharper vocal cuts through to urge “Come on, baby, make your mind up!” it’s a clear pull from the Dijon playbook, but it doesn’t feel overly referential. LAROI delivers his best performances when he doesn’t give into defeat, but he seems to have grown tired of fighting by the end of the album.
There’s a lot of that on Before I Forget, perhaps most distinctly on the ballad “Maybe I’m Wrong.” “I got so mad I wrote three different songs, but I scrapped them all ’cause it’s not what I want,” LAROI sings over a somber piano melody. “When I think ’bout the good times the anger dissolves/Can’t have each other, but still got these songs.” He starts to find his way back to some forward momentum, at least creatively, on “Back When You Were Mine,” but it’s too little too late — the album is over, closing out on an unsettled and uncertain note. The highs of the record are some of the best of his career. They inadvertently draw even more attention to the lows.
If the scrapped Watch This! was full of deeply infatuated songs about a reality he can no longer relate to, LAROI can’t be blamed for not wanting to spend the next year or so performing them on the road and hearing them on the radio. He already has to contend with a scathing record about his breakup being a Top 10 pop airplay hit (Tate McRae’s “Tit For Tat” has been widely perceived as a response to “A Cold Play,” which was released as this album’s lead single last fall). But since she apparently won’t respond to his texts, as he sings on “Rather Be,” he’s stuck holding up a boombox blaring Before I Forget and hoping his pleas for forgiveness, or at the very least acknowledgement, don’t fall on deaf ears — whether hers or ours.
