LaROSA IN A DARK WONDERLAND

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Catching Up With Isabel LaRosa, the 21-Year-Old Architecture of TikTok Ennui, On Her New EP, ‘Promising Young Woman’

This story is taken from VALŪS Issue 005 Autumn 2026 - ORDER YOUR COPIES HERE

DURING a rare moment of calm in Los Angeles, following a tour across Europe, Cuban-American singer-songwriter Isabel LaRosa finds herself grounded, navigating the rabbit hole of pop stardom in the social media era. At just 21, this is no small feat.

"It can take you anywhere really fast, everything's unpredictable," LaRosa tells VALŪS about the current state of the music industry. "One day you could have nothing, and the next day you could have a hit. That's my least favorite part... No sense of security."

Every release might be the bottle that makes you grow tall, or the one that shrinks you down into nothingness. LaRosa pauses to reflect, aware that prior to TikTok, pop stars measured their growth concert by concert, watching their success build gradually as crowds materialized in the flesh. "Now, it's hard to define," she says. "They're just numbers on a screen."

While critics often reduce viral music to sheer luck, LaRosa’s rise stems from a conscious, almost academic study of short-form digital syntax. Alongside her brother and producer, Thomas LaRosa, she has unabashedly demystified a production technique that most artists treat as an industry secret.

"Thomas and I were on TikTok, and we noticed how edit sounds would compress everything right before the chorus," LaRosa says. "We were like, why wouldn't we just put that on a song? It doesn't have to sound like an edit, but we could use that to make the chorus feel bigger... We definitely took notes from those things."

By embedding sudden frequency drops, extreme compression, and sub-bass explosions directly into LaRosa’s studio arrangements, the siblings engineered a sound tailored for the hyper-accelerated attention span of the internet generation. Her hit “Favorite” became a TikTok icon, leveraging millions of short-form video views into over half a billion streams on Spotify.

“But I don’t think that’s the sole reason why I’m successful,” LaRosa defends. To be fair, even if these structures are now being exploited by projects and corporations seeking immediate clicks from the post-web listener, her work is clearly anchored in genuine emotional weight and thematic tension. “If people didn't like the songs, they weren't going to blow up anyway.”

Top by ANIYE RECORDS, Skirt by SEHNSUCHT, Tiara, Cross Necklace, and Bracelets by TARINA TARANTINO — Top by ANIYE RECORDS, Skirt by **SEHNSUCHT**, Tiara, Cross Necklace, and Bracelets by **TARINA** **TARANTINO**

On her latest release, the EP “Promising Young Woman” (2026), LaRosa builds on the subversion of innocence. A sonic and visual universe that operates at the intersection of dark romance and digital anxiety, with the universe of Alice in Wonderland at its center.

"There's something very unsettling about Alice in Wonderland, with the appearance of perfection," she explains. "That's kind of what the EP is about for me: trying to upkeep this level of perfection, the appearance of no flaws. But everything underneath the surface is actually darker... It’s about rotten innocence, the loss of it, and the way you feel about yourself."

This is particularly striking on "American Wedding," one of the EP's standout tracks and its closing number, where LaRosa whispers about her dream wedding. "Tell me that I’m pretty, make me feel like heaven," she begs the listener, implying that she has realized that the experience is an unattainable fantasy: "Tell me, can we please have an American wedding?"

Jacket and Short by W!lDCH!LD, Earrings, Necklace, and Bracelets by TARINA TARANTINO, Ballet Flats by CHANEL — Jacket and Short by **W!lDCH!LD**, Earrings, Necklace, and Bracelets by **TARINA** **TARANTINO**, Ballet Flats by **CHANEL**

That experience of finally opening one's eyes, allowing oneself to be buried inside Wonderland and unmasking the illusions carried through social media, is present across the EP. But, it is framed primarily within the lead single, "Hallucination." Beneath layers of reverb and whispered harmonics, LaRosa laments her inability to "trust my feelings, thoughts on fire and barely eating," before a synth with industrial textures cuts through the track's stillness: "Visions in the nighttime, my only lifeline."

This penchant for high-stakes melodrama is not purely an aesthetic exercise; it is rooted in her bicultural heritage. Raised by a Cuban mother in Maryland, LaRosa grew up immersed in an eclectic sonic landscape, listening to Los Van Van and Celia Cruz alongside Led Zeppelin and jazz standards.

When asked if her music videos are influenced by telenovelas, LaRosa admits, "I think there's something about Latin culture that feels very dramatic, very confessional, and I love that so much. Maybe even without realizing it, that's played a part in what I love, in the visuals I create, because I'm very dramatic at my core."

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LaRosa has been integrating her roots organically into her alternative framework, whether through adding a Spanish verse to her hit "Favorite" with the help of songwriter Elena Rose or collaborating with global powerhouse Karol G on “Still,” a track that eventually brought Bruno Mars into the fold.

The experience has been so powerful for her, that now she wants to keep building bridges to “explore my Cuban roots more deeply. That's kind of what I've been working on… I don't want to say too much yet.”

As she distances herself from the Wonderland of algorithmic metrics and social media perfection and begins to dig deeper into her own roots, LaRosa turns toward a future where digital fantasies dissolve, giving way to a success that feels more her own.