Conan Gray - Kid Krow

Conan Gray built an audience on YouTube from a small town in Texas, then turned that following into one of the most assured pop debuts of 2020. Kid Krow arrived in March of that year and immediately went top five on the Billboard 200, the biggest debut of the year for a new artist at the time — an unusually confident first record from someone who had spent his teens writing songs in a bedroom in Georgetown.

What makes it stick is the specificity. "Heather" became a genuine phenomenon, a quiet, jealous little song about wanting to be someone else that found millions of people who felt exactly the same way. "Maniac" is the record's biggest hook, "Wish You Were Sober" turns a party into a slow-motion disaster, and "The Story" closes the album on the kind of naked, unadorned writing most artists take three records to reach. The two interstitial fragments, "(Online Love)" and "(Can We Be Friends?)," give the whole thing the shape of a scrapbook rather than a playlist.

Half bedroom-pop, half full-scale radio pop, it captures a very particular kind of young loneliness better than almost anything else from its moment.

This is the Republic Records LP pressing. The debut that made Conan Gray, and still the record most of his fans reach for first.