Isabel LaRosa writes the treatment and directs every one of her own music videos, a practice that began with the three-part short film behind her 2022 debut EP I'm Watching You and has never stopped. “I direct all my videos and write them,” she told Ticketmaster UK in October 2025. The 21-year-old dark-pop singer also styles herself, sequences her own tracklists and, until 2025, wrote songs with exactly one other person: her brother. In a scene increasingly defined by artist-auteurs, the kid from the Annapolis jazz clubs might be the most complete one.
The jazz-club apprenticeship
LaRosa's grip on her own image traces back to a childhood where music was a family operation. Her father, a hobbyist jazz saxophonist who “always kind of wanted jazz musician kids,” brought her to jazz clubs and open mic nights around Annapolis, Maryland from early childhood. By age seven she was singing standards while her brother Thomas LaRosa, four years older, backed her on guitar. Thomas started writing his own songs at 11. Isabel followed, and the two have written together since she was in elementary school.
She was homeschooled, which she credits, in a roundabout way, for the raven obsession that later named her debut album. More practically, growing up outside conventional structures seems to have normalized doing everything in-house. By the time she signed to Slumbo Labs/RCA Records in February 2022, at 17 and still finishing high school online, the label was absorbing an act that already wrote, recorded and visualized its own material.
How does Isabel LaRosa direct her videos?
The method is disarmingly simple.
I just listen to the song on repeat and write down what I visualize in my notes app. Then I go through and write out a detailed treatment.Isabel LaRosa, Galore Mag
The results are anything but casual. Her debut EP arrived as a video trilogy, “HAUNTED,” “HELP” and “HEAVEN,” co-written and co-directed by LaRosa so the three clips form one continuous short film. The self-directed video for her breakout single “i'm yours” followed in November 2022, two weeks after the song went TikTok-viral on its way to RIAA Platinum. The habit ran on through “older” and “eyes don't lie” and into the Raven era.
Her reference points are not other pop videos but prestige thrillers: Euphoria, the early seasons of Stranger Things, Get Out, True Detective, Ozark. That is no accident of taste. In high school she seriously debated pursuing film and directing instead of music, and she has called directing “always a dream of mine.”
A control freak, on the record
“I'm sort of a control freak,” she told Karma Magazine in May 2025, in the same breath as the directing-dream line. The control extends well past the camera. She has no stylist: she sources her own stage looks from Etsy, Depop and LA's Trashy Lingerie, repairs them on the road with safety pins, and made her 2024 MTV VMAs debut without professional styling. “The VMAs were surreal,” she told 1883 Magazine. “I'm such a fan of Katy Perry... I didn't even have a stylist!”
The business side is just as lean. Public records show a label (Slumbo Labs/RCA) and a booking agency (Wasserman Music), and that is roughly it: no personal manager or management firm appears in any public source, and no brand-endorsement deals are on the record. Her footprint is music, touring and direct-to-fan merch, with the creative work kept in the family.
The treatment starts in a notes app. The empire stays in the family.
The self-directors' scene
LaRosa is the sharpest example of a pattern running through the current dark-pop generation: artists who treat the visual world as part of the songwriting, not a service they order afterward. Dutch Melrose works the same way, with video credits that literally read “direct/edit/color: Dutch Melrose” on releases like “ANGEL” and “DIRTY LITTLE FIEND.” The generation that came up posting its own clips never learned to outsource the frame, and LaRosa, who was cutting a self-directed trilogy at 17, is its purest case.
The auteur model now faces its biggest test. In 2026 LaRosa steps into arenas for the first time, supporting Madison Beer's Locket Tour across Europe and the UK, with a new EP, Promising Young Woman, that she calls “music I've never really done before.” Bigger rooms usually mean bigger teams. Everything in her career so far suggests the notes app stays in charge.