I Know Love

I Know Love: Tate McRae, The Kid LAROI, and Two Young Careers Intersecting

Pop's New Guard Takes Center Stage

The early months of 2025 offered a glimpse of what the next generation of global pop had been building toward. Tate McRae, the Canadian singer-songwriter who had turned you broke me first into a streaming phenomenon and then followed it with the sharp, self-possessed pop of think later, had established herself as one of the most commercially potent young artists of her generation. The Kid LAROI, the Australian rapper and singer who had co-written STAY with Justin Bieber and achieved a global profile before turning twenty, occupied a comparable position in the pop-adjacent rap space. When the two collaborated on I Know Love, the resulting single carried the accumulated momentum of two careers that had been building toward exactly this kind of collision.

The Sound of a Cross-Genre Collaboration

Collaborations between pop singers and pop-rap artists had become one of the defining production patterns of the streaming era, and I Know Love approached the formula with genuine craft. McRae's crystalline vocal quality and LAROI's melodic rap-singing style are not obvious complements, but the production found space for both without forcing either into an awkward register. The track inhabits the emotionally charged territory both artists had been most effective in throughout their careers: young love examined with more complexity than the genre's conventions usually require, given texture by the specific sonic signatures each collaborator brought to the project.

The Chart Debut

I Know Love debuted at number 43 on the Billboard Hot 100 on March 8, 2025, reflecting the combined streaming strength of two artists with substantial dedicated fan bases. The chart run lasted two weeks, with the single sliding to 73 in its second week. For a collaboration between two artists at this career stage, a debut in the forties with two weeks of chart presence represents solid commercial performance: the fans showed up, the song got heard, and the audiences of both artists were introduced to the other's work through a genuinely appealing piece of music.

Two Young Artists, Two Different Roads to the Same Place

What makes the pairing interesting is how different McRae and LAROI's paths to global recognition were. McRae came up through dance competitions and songwriting before finding viral success through TikTok; LAROI was discovered through SoundCloud and mentored by Juice WRLD before signing with Columbia. Both emerged at a moment when the traditional structures of the music industry were being disrupted by streaming and social media, and both built their careers by exploiting the new pathways that disruption opened. I Know Love is in some sense a document of where those paths converged.

The Emotion and the Market

With over 8.2 million YouTube views accumulating across the first months after release, the song found its audience with the efficiency you'd expect from two artists who had each already demonstrated a precise understanding of what their listeners respond to. The emotional territory of the song, the knowing and uncertain quality of young love, the way experience both confirms and complicates feeling, connected with an audience that was living exactly that territory. McRae in particular had developed a reputation for writing about romantic emotion with enough specificity to feel personal and enough generality to feel universal, and I Know Love extended that reputation into a collaborative format without diluting it. LAROI's presence gave the song a different kind of credibility: a voice that had spoken credibly about loss and longing to a global audience, now speaking about recognition and connection. Both artists were still in their early twenties; the song's emotional authority comes not from long experience but from the intensity with which young feeling is processed. Press play when you want to hear what 2025's pop sounds like when it is made by people who are still young enough to mean every word of it.

“I Know Love” — Tate McRae featuring The Kid LAROI's singular moment on the 2020s charts.