INTERVIEW: Rising superstar Isabel LaRosa on her upcoming Australian tour: " I've always naturally felt attracted to the alternative...but I'm a pop girl at my core."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Published: 23 January 2025
Cuban-American Isabel LaRosa is one of music’s hottest young talents and this February will be bringing her Heaven Doesn’t Wait tour to Australia, her first ever performances in this country.
Signed to RCA Records when she was just 17, LaRosa released her debut single ‘16 Candles’ in 2021. The following year she released her debut EP I’m Watching You, and the same year had a breakthrough when her single ‘I’m Yours’ went viral, achieving platinum status in the US and is now approaching half a billion streams on Spotify alone. Her second EP, You Fear the God That Loves You, dropped in 2023.
LaRosa’s music is an intriguing listen that expertly manages to toy with multiple genres while steadfastly clinging to none. There are classic touches of electropop, rock and indie but LaRosa packages it up in such a way that never allows one style to dominate. The result is something that keeps you engrossed and can never be relegated to background listening.
Often dark and moody sonically, LaRosa’s lyrical content explore the coming-of-age transformation from a teenager into an adult, and the emotions, infatuations, love, heartbreak and sexual awakening the period brings. Last year’s ‘favorite’ looks at desire and the need to be idolised by your partner - ‘Say my name, I want the neighbours to hear it’ - while ‘pretty boy’ explores almost the opposite situation, being so infatuated by the object of your desire it controls your life: ‘I'm so obsessed, it's not a choice’. The theme of obsession is flipped on 2022’s ‘Heartbeat’, where L:aRosa taunts her lover: ‘You hate it that you love me…Obsessivе, you look closely, but I like that.’ 2023’s ‘older’ shows a weariness, an exhaustion of the intensity of young love as she pines for someone older that is already past that stage, with a maturity beyond her years.: ‘Think I need someone older / Just a little bit colder…guys my age just aren't the same.’
Still only 20 years old, LaRosa is a remarkably assured and confident artist that promises even greater things in the coming years. Her debut Australian shows are the perfect introduction to her incredible talent, and we recently sat down with her to find out more.
Hi Isabel, it is so good to chat with you today. Congratulations on everything by the way. First of all, your music is like next level, suburban horror story.
That's exactly what I'm going for! Thank you.
I want to ask you, the title of your tour Heaven Doesn't Wait. How does the title relate to what's coming for us?
The title definitely hints at some stuff that I have coming up soon, and I wanted to kind of lead into a few things that I can't talk about as much right now with that title. I feel like I talk in music and in themes throughout videos and stuff like that about death, to be honest. To me, Heaven Doesn't Wait felt like you never know how much time you're going to have, so enjoy it. That's where it came from for me, but I don’t know how other people might take it.
I actually think that's lovely. I added, I added way too much drama onto that!
Oh, trust me, there's always drama! But that's the not morbid way of putting it.
It's really just your way of saying dance like nobody's watching!
Yeah, pretty much it's like you might die, so live it up!
The themes that you explore, both in your music and also visually in the gorgeous music videos you create, is love, but it is a shift on love. You sing about obsession, but from various angles, which I find really interesting, and feeling stuck and having so much time to pour into certain emotions. Are you writing predominantly a from personal experience, or does this all just come from a world you have created?
Honestly, most of it is based on my own life. There are certain songs that I've written from a less honest place, and I can just tell, it's more obvious to me. Me and my brother write everything together, and we tend to write the best stuff when it's closer to home. So honestly, yes, the vast majority of stuff is, my own experiences, and talking about those.
Beautiful, and because you're writing them with someone that knows you so well, you can catch each other up.
Seriously, it's funny because we'll be writing about maybe a situation that's happening in my life, and he'll be writing lyrics too, and it sounds like I would have written them because he knows me and my life so well. I'm so lucky to be able to work with somebody that like, he’s my best friend and we get the best product when we write together. It's just fun, I love it.
I do love that you have this bold and dark pop. I don't like genre because I don't think it's really a thing so much anymore, but you definitely have a signature sound. I'm curious how you feel your sound is evolving as you're navigating this industry, particularly with the single from last year ‘muse’?
The hope is that the sound is always evolving. I feel like it's definitely changed, and the goal has changed since ‘I'm Yours’. Oftentimes we're trying to capture a similar feeling, but just in a different way, but I feel like ‘muse’ is so different feel wise than an ‘I'm Yours’. It’s also fun to incorporate sounds that feel more fitting to our live show, because our live shows are more intense than you think that it would be based on songs like ‘I'm Yours’. So I feel like having songs like ‘muse’ in there is really fun because it adds to the live show when we do play. But honestly, it's just experimenting and always continuing to move forward. It's never good when you're trying to do the same thing over and over and over again, I just like switching it up.
Absolutely, I believe that the world of listeners are much more they're much kinder than my generation were to artists switching it up. They allow room for a shift in sound.
Yeah, it's so interesting. I feel like now the playing field is so even because it's all social media, and so many different things are doing well at the same time. It’s not like there's one sound right now that’s ‘the thing’. It's not like early 2000s pop and that's it. Everything is massive, and I think it's really cool to see.
Speaking of which, your music gives a nod to the darker tinges of beautiful moments. Pulling apart beautiful things and seeing the gray, seeing the bad and the good equally. Was this also present in the kind of music that you listened to and that got you into music in the first place? Music that was a little off kilter?
Yeah, totally. I grew up on a lot of different things, I grew up on a lot of salsa - oddly enough! - and classic rock, because that's what my mom listened to. I also grew up singing jazz standards because that's what my dad listened to. But once I started to get older and was able to understand how to work YouTube, the artists that I gravitated towards were Melanie Martinez, The Neighbourhood, Arctic Monkeys, early Lady Gaga. I've always naturally felt attracted to the alternative, but I still love the songwriting of pop. I love it and I'm a pop girl at my core, but I also love when it has off kilter elements to it too.
Gorgeous. And again, it's the drama. You mentioned your live shows, and you must be absolutely loving it, because they seem to be, just from a viewer's perspective, incredibly physically demanding on you as well, like you really hurl yourself around that stage!
I really do! By the end of it, I'm like, I'm going to pass out. But they’re so much fun. I definitely do a lot of running and a lot of jumping and moving around. I am also such a massive fan of 21 Pilots and I grew up wanting to put on a show like they do, because they were always so high energy and I always admired the fact that it was only two people on stage, and they still put on that intensive show. And I was like, ‘I want to do that’. So it's just [my brother] Thomas and I on stage, and hopefully it's energetic enough. I gotta take up the amount of stage space that a band would take up, so I have to run around.
Can I ask you from those suburban moments, from the salsa, the jazz, fighting YouTube, and now finding yourself throwing around a stage on a headline show in Australia. Apart from just high-fiving her, is there any particular nugget of advice you would give to your younger self in navigating this very bizarre life?
That's so interesting, I feel like it's still something that I am trying to like figure out now, but I would say, to try to use what's weird about you to your advantage. Use the things that maybe are not perfect, like your music taste, or the way your face looks, or like something like that. Go full in on being weird and don't try to fit something that you're just never going to fit. Committing to knowing that you're not going to be completely up the middle is a really cool thing and that’s what will set you apart. It took me a while to understand that, and I'm still figuring it out. Trying to figure out how to use the things that maybe aren't as normal in a creative way.
I love that so much, and I can totally see it in your music and your styling. Thank you so much for your time Isabel and, of course, for having such beautiful music.
Thank you so much for having me. I really, really appreciate that. This is one of the interviews I've enjoyed the most recently, so genuinely thank you so much for having me.
Isabel LaRosa will tour Australia in February. Tickets are on sale now.
24 February - Prince Bandroom, Melbourne
26 February - The Triffid, Brisbane
27 February - Liberty Hall, Sydney
