Kid Krow is the debut studio album by American singer-songwriter Conan Gray. It was released on March 20, 2020, through Republic Records. The album includes the singles "Checkmate", "Comfort Crowd", "Maniac", "The Story" and "Wish You Were Sober", all of which have accumulated over 92 million streams online. Kid Krow received positive reviews from music critics for its production, songwriting, and Gray's vocal performance. Commercially, it debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 and further topped the US Pop Albums Chart; also debuting at number two on the Top Album Sales chart. Kid Krow received a boost in sales and re-entered the charts of several countries when its track "Heather" became a sleeper hit after gaining popularity on the online platform TikTok. Gray told People that the album was inspired by his "pretty rough" childhood in Texas, explaining: "When you're young, it's really hard to imagine life not always being hard. I lived in a really unsafe household, and life just wasn't very good for me. And so, as a kid, I was just like, there's no way that I'm gonna make it, there's no way that I'm going to survive or there's no way that there's going to be anything more to my life than just dealing with pain." Gray told Teen Vogue that growing up as a child of mixed race in Texas affected who he is as a person, as he felt that "he didn't really belong anywhere." He told Clash: "The record is a study of how I perceive the world. I talk a lot about my friends and