The 2020s File Feature
Always Do
Always Do: Chart Performance and Context "Always Do" is a track by The Kid LAROI that emerged during the extraordinarily productive and commercially successf…
01 The Story
Always Do: Chart Performance and Context
"Always Do" is a track by The Kid LAROI that emerged during the extraordinarily productive and commercially successful period of 2020 and 2021 in which the young Australian rapper established himself as one of the most-streamed artists in the world. The song reflects the emotional and sonic territory that had made LAROI a phenomenon: melodic, emotionally raw rap that drew heavily from the post-SoundCloud aesthetic pioneered by artists like Juice WRLD, with whom LAROI had been closely associated before Juice WRLD's death in December 2019.
The Kid LAROI, born Charlton Howard in Sydney, Australia, had been signed to Grade A Productions and Columbia Records, a deal that gave him major-label infrastructure while connecting him to the mentorship and creative environment associated with Juice WRLD's team. His 2020 mixtape "F*CK LOVE" became one of the most-streamed debut projects of the year, generating multiple Hot 100 entries and establishing his streaming numbers as comparable to established stars rather than emerging artists.
"Always Do" appeared as part of the expanded and revised edition of "F*CK LOVE," which was released in multiple iterations throughout 2020 and into 2021 as additional tracks were added to the project. The mixtape ultimately reached the top ten of the Billboard 200, an extraordinary commercial performance for a project that had originated as a free digital release. Its streaming numbers were driven by LAROI's ability to generate daily listening activity from an enormously engaged young audience.
The song's production places it squarely within the melodic trap tradition that LAROI had adopted as his primary artistic framework. The beat's construction, with its minor-key harmonic palette and its emphasis on atmospheric texture over conventional verse-chorus structure, reflects the influence of the producers in LAROI's orbit, many of whom had also worked with Juice WRLD and other artists in the emotional rap ecosystem. The production creates the kind of sonic environment that LAROI's confessional lyrical content requires.
LAROI's chart performance during 2020 and 2021 was one of the more remarkable stories in recent pop history. He became the first Australian artist to have a number-one single on the Hot 100 when "Stay," his collaboration with Justin Bieber, reached the top spot in 2021. While "Always Do" predated that peak commercial moment, it was part of the sustained chart activity that demonstrated his audience's depth and engagement across multiple tracks rather than a single viral moment.
Grade A Productions, founded by Juice WRLD's manager Peter Jideonwo, played a crucial role in shaping LAROI's early career and ensuring that his signing to Columbia positioned him for the kind of sustained commercial investment that emerging artists often fail to receive from major labels. The infrastructure and the creative relationships that came with the Grade A connection gave "Always Do" and the broader "F*CK LOVE" project resources and promotional support that contributed to their commercial performance.
Critical reception of LAROI's 2020 output generally acknowledged that his emotional authenticity and his melodic gifts set him apart from many of his contemporaries in the emo-rap space. Reviewers noted that while the sonic territory he occupied had been established by artists who preceded him, his execution within that territory was consistently impressive and his ability to generate genuinely affecting music rather than merely stylistically competent music was one of his most valuable qualities as an artist.
The cultural context of 2020, shaped profoundly by the COVID-19 pandemic and the social isolation it produced, also shaped the reception of LAROI's emotionally vulnerable music. Young audiences spending unprecedented amounts of time indoors and online found in his catalog an emotional articulation of feelings of loss, loneliness, and the difficulty of maintaining relationships under pressure, themes that resonated with unusual sharpness during a year of collective disruption.
"Always Do" accumulated streaming numbers that reflected this emotional connection with its audience, contributing to the overall streaming totals that sustained LAROI's chart presence throughout 2020. His total streaming numbers across all platforms during 2020 placed him consistently among the most-consumed artists globally, a remarkable achievement for an artist who had been virtually unknown outside Australia just a few years earlier.
In the broader context of LAROI's early career, "Always Do" represents one of the many tracks through which he established the emotional landscape of his artistry and built the audience that would propel him to number one. It is part of the foundation on which his later commercial breakthroughs were built, a piece of the larger body of work that made his rise one of the defining stories of popular music in the early 2020s.
02 Song Meaning
Always Do: Themes and Meaning
"Always Do" belongs to the confessional, emotionally unguarded tradition of emo-rap that The Kid LAROI had adopted as his primary artistic mode. The song addresses patterns of behavior within relationships, specifically the tendency to repeat mistakes, to fall back into familiar but destructive dynamics, and to be unable to change despite genuine desire to do so. The title captures this repetition compulsion with efficient precision: whatever the problematic behavior is, the subject of the song always does it.
LAROI's lyrical approach on this track is characterized by an emotional directness that strips away defensive irony and engages with the subject matter from a position of genuine vulnerability. He describes the internal experience of knowing that his behavior is causing harm while feeling unable to stop it, a pattern that is recognizable to virtually anyone who has struggled with self-defeating habits in the context of a romantic relationship. This universality of emotional experience, dressed in the specific language of LAROI's young perspective, is a significant source of the track's resonance.
The shadow of Juice WRLD is present throughout LAROI's early catalog, and "Always Do" is no exception. LAROI has spoken openly about how profoundly Juice WRLD's death affected him, and the emotional themes of his music during this period, including guilt, loss, and the difficulty of moving forward, carry an additional weight that goes beyond ordinary heartbreak. The song can be heard as addressing romantic relationships, but it also participates in a broader processing of grief and the survivor's particular burden of continuing to live and create in the aftermath of loss.
The production environment that surrounds the vocal performance on "Always Do" is deliberately immersive, creating a sonic space that matches the emotional claustrophobia of the lyrical content. The minor-key harmonic palette and the atmospheric production textures create a sense of being enclosed within the emotional situation being described, which makes the listening experience more visceral and more immediately affecting than a more conventionally arranged production might achieve.
For LAROI's catalog, "Always Do" is one of the tracks that established his capacity for emotional authenticity as the foundation of his artistic identity. He arrived in the marketplace at a moment when many artists were mining the emo-rap aesthetic for its commercial potential without necessarily bringing genuine emotional investment to the material. His ability to make the vulnerability feel real rather than performed was, and remains, one of the primary reasons his audience formed the intense connection with his music that drove his extraordinary streaming numbers.
The theme of behavioral repetition in relationships that the song addresses has deep roots in popular music across genres and decades, but LAROI's treatment of it is inflected by his specific generational context. His is the experience of someone navigating emotional life in a media-saturated environment where relationships are documented and performed as well as lived, where the gap between private feeling and public presentation is a constant source of additional pressure. The song does not address these conditions directly, but they are part of the water in which it swims.
Ultimately, "Always Do" is a song about the difficulty of personal change, specifically the gap between intention and behavior that defines so much of emotional life. Its emotional honesty and its melodic delivery combine to create a track that functions as both confession and lament, an acknowledgment that knowing better and doing better are not the same thing. This recognition is at once a source of pain and a source of connection, which is why the song found such a large and engaged audience among young listeners navigating their own versions of the same struggle.
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