Let You Taste It: Isabel LaRosa Speaks Out
Isabel LaRosa – whose dark-pop first blew up on TikTok in 2022 – writes and directs all her music videos. They take place in cars on empty roads lined with ominous woods, at house parties, or on silent, dark suburban streets whose quiet flatness you dream to escape from, but romanticise when you do. “We film almost all my videos in Atlanta or upstate New York because I’m like, this needs to look like where I’m from, and it has to have the east coast woods,” LaRosa laughs. “I was home-schooled for a really long time, and I was the weird, outdoors-y kid, like I would literally sit in trees all day, writing really cryptic stories.”
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She’s been building this world – her “universe” – for years, describing it as a merge of visual nods to True Detective, Stranger Things and Euphoria, which she combines with “an expansion of the world I already grew up in. Some parts are exaggerated: I went to parties but I don’t drink or do drugs, I’m not that crazy of a person,” she adds, tugging on her black babydoll dress, her doe eyes made even bigger with kohl.
She’s just played her first ever show in London at a sold out Heaven, where the line snaked around the block. Lots of excited girls. Lots of gloriously big-soled boots and eyeliner. “From what I’ve seen all the girls seem so sweet and, like, friends with each other. And that’s what I want,” she says eagerly. “I’ve been to so many concerts where it’s male dominated and I’ve felt uncomfortable. It’s also so much fun when you wait in line and make friends with people – I want my shows and my fanbase to feel that it’s a safe place for them to be there for each other.”
LaRosa, who turned 20 in September, has been performing since childhood, when her saxophonist father would take her and her brother, Thomas, to “jams and open mic nights”, where she’d sing jazz standards while Thomas played guitar: “I’m very grateful for all the experience I had performing because now it doesn’t feel like a foreign thing.”
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But she kind of laughs when she thinks back to those wholesome moments. These days, her show is bathed in blood red light – very Carrie – and spiky with white strobing. Her name fills the wall behind her in an Akira-style font with the final ‘A’ forming an inverted crucifix. It’s just her, a backing track, and Thomas, his guitar riffs slicing through the synths. On record, she has a sensual falsetto but, live, the duo toe the line of a rock show, upping the pace and letting LaRosa dig into her lower vocal register.
One of her touchpoints is Twenty One Pilots. “I love them so much, and I remember wanting to put on a high energy show like they did, wanting to do something that would hit you in the face,” LaRosa explains. “My show is so physical that I have to use more of my chest voice, and I’m naturally an alto. I can’t jump and sing in a breathy tone, I would fucking pass out!”
Before her 2022 breakthrough track, ‘I’m yours’ (currently sitting on 426 million Spotify streams), LaRosa had released a handful of singles. Some, like ‘Therapy’ and ’16 Candles’, contain faint echoes of the yearning that would become one of her hallmarks, but, for the most part, she was simply experimenting.
“With ‘16 Candles’ and ‘Game Boy’, I was really trying to find the lane that felt right and I didn’t know what it was yet. Then I wrote a song called ‘HAUNTED’ and that matched the vision in my head of what I wanted my visuals to be like. Dark. Moody. That was where it clicked for me.”
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Much of LaRosa’s music is built around dreamy choruses that soar, cathedral-like, and evoke the mind-altering, stomach-knotting desire that one feels only a few times in life. It’s no surprise then that her viral tracks – ‘older’, ‘favorite’, ‘i’m yours’ – are beloved of fan editors on TikTok, who use them as soundtracks for artful and incredibly thirsty montages of their favourite singers and actors.
LaRosa laughs. She’s seen plenty of them over the years. “I want my music to feel like it could be in a movie, and that you’re the main character. That’s what I like listening to, you know, it’s the most fun thing. When I lived in my hometown, I’d bike at 3am around the city and blare music in my ears. You want something that makes you feel cinematic.”
This is why her videos are miniature movies and why, for a brief moment (“One month, when I was fifteen,” she laughs), LaRosa considered changing careers from music to film. She created a visual trilogy for ‘HAUNTED’, ‘HELP’ and ‘HEAVEN’, and plugged into her love of horror in “older” where she’s not alone in her secret crush on a teacher as her schoolmates vie for his attention.
“Everyone has [probably] had a crush on a teacher at some point, but I wanted to play on the simplicity of that with a plot twist. In middle school – the worst time to go to school – girl relationships during that time are so insane. It’s brutal. I didn’t go to school for a long time for a reason. I had best friends that hated me. I wanted some relatability [in that video] where she’s your friend but there’s this intense competition under the surface, I feel like a lot of girls can relate to that.”
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When meeting LaRosa in the big, shiny London headquarters of her label, she jumps out of her chair, all smiles. She asks each person how their day is going. For someone with over 1.5 billion Spotify streams on a handful of songs, LaRosa is solidly down to earth, but LaRosa doesn’t feel much like a famous person. TikTok’s creation of monster hits is effective but it often comes with a facelessness that makes it increasingly harder for artists to gain traction long-term.
“I always thought if you have a big song, you’ll be more of a celebrity but it doesn’t work like that now. There can be such a disconnect. It takes so much time to build awareness of who you are and your visual world. I just have to remind myself that this is a long game and I’m not doing it for that. The faster you go up, the faster you can go down,” she says. “So I’m trying to slowly build a world that people can get lost in. I want to have a very strong artist image and persona so that it’s easy to understand what that world is besides the music.”
The other challenge is the ‘unknown’. There are thousands of accounts on Instagram and TikTok wanting you to believe they’ve cracked platforms’ algorithms. They haven’t. Even LaRosa, with multiple viral hits, can’t predict a song’s success. “I believe in all the songs I put out there but you never know what’s going to connect,” she says. “There have been so many songs I love but they just don’t connect on social media or whatever, and I’ve resigned myself to knowing I have zero control over that.”
Instead LaRosa focuses on the evolution of her work on her own terms, all of which is done in tandem with her brother as her co-writer and producer; her latest single ‘Muse‘ (inspired by both Muse’s ‘Supermassive Black Hole’ and her musician boyfriend, Saint Kid) features a far heavier use of guitars, while an unreleased track, ‘Home’, which she plays live to her adoring crowd, is rooted in drum & bass.
“I do have a lot of stuff that I’m working on,” she says cagily with a smile. “But I just want to be bigger – I’d like to have more music out and have more of a visual world established. To sell out bigger shows. The end goal is always stadiums but I don’t think that will be next year. Arenas, let’s say arenas. How hard you work now, that will get you somewhere in eight months, and that’s what I try to think about.”
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Words: Taylor Glasby
Live Photography: Sam Monendo
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