A psychopomp is a guide between the world of the living and the dead, and in folklore the raven is one of its oldest forms. Isabel LaRosa built her entire 2025 on that image: her debut album Raven, released April 18, 2025 on Slumbo Labs/RCA Records, and the Psychopomp Tour it launched, a headline run that carried the bird from San Diego to Paris. The mythology was not a marketing flourish bolted on by a label. It started with a homeschooled kid in Annapolis listening to audiobooks about corvids.
What does “psychopomp” actually mean?
LaRosa gave the cleanest definition herself, days after the album dropped. “A psychopomp is a guide into the afterlife,” she told the Tennessean, “and ravens, they're also associated with change and rebirth. They can be associated with a bad omen, but you can choose to look at it that way or not.” That choice, reading the death bird as a rebirth bird, is the whole thesis of the record.
Ravens... tend to represent change and also death and rebirth... I'm writing about things that have really scared me to write about in the past.Isabel LaRosa, Milky Interviews
There is also a wink underneath the gothic surface: she has said the title doubles as a nod to her hometown NFL team, the Baltimore Ravens. The guide to the underworld is also the local franchise.
Where did the raven obsession come from?
Not from a branding session. “I grew up homeschooled, and I listened to a bunch of these audiobooks about crows and ravens,” she told Luna Collective on release day. “I was obsessed with crows and ravens.” The bird sat in her head for a decade before it had an album to land on, which is why the imagery reads as native rather than art-directed: the raven was hers before the career was.
The album underneath the bird
Announced on Valentine's Day 2025 alongside the single “Home,” Raven runs 14 tracks and chronicles, in her words, “change, rebirth, and all the rites of passage that feed into it, like growing up, shedding your childhood, having your heart broken, and coming out on the other side a new person.” She has described half of it as written from heartbreak and half from anger, and the sequencing as deliberate: “I love things with a narrative... I wanted the order to be really specific.”
It was also the first time she let anyone besides her brother and sole producer Thomas LaRosa into the room: Amy Allen, Ian Kirkpatrick, Delacey, Noonie Bao and Elena Rose on the writing side, with OJIVOLTA, The Monsters & Strangerz and Lucas Sim joining Thomas on production. Her personal favorite is the closer, “Burning”: “It talks about things I've wanted to say for a long time but just couldn't talk about.” The album has since been certified Gold in Brazil.
The tour that carried it across two continents
The Psychopomp Tour opened across North America the same week the album arrived, running from San Diego through a Los Angeles closer, then returned in November and December 2025 as a Live Nation-produced European and UK headline run: Bristol (November 30), London (December 2), Glasgow (December 3), Manchester (December 6) and Birmingham (December 7), plus Madrid, Zurich, Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Cologne, Warsaw, Milan, Berlin, Prague, Munich and Paris. She has called Psychopomp her favorite tour so far, and her stated goal for the shows fits the mythology exactly: “I want it to feel like you're being brought into a different world for an hour and a half.”
The same album cycle put her on the summer's biggest stages: a Governors Ball main-stage set on June 6, Lollapalooza Chicago on August 1 (a 170-plus-act bill that also included Christian Gates), Lollapalooza India in March, and European festivals from Sziget to Pukkelpop.
The bird is a guide between worlds. The album is about crossing one.
What comes after the raven?
The era closed the way psychopomp stories are supposed to: with a crossing. In May 2026 she released “Hallucination,” a stripped-back single born, she says, of vivid nightmares and “the process of moving on from someone,” leading into the Promising Young Woman EP, which she calls “music I've never really done before.” This year also brings her first arena stages, supporting Madison Beer's Locket Tour across Europe and the UK, plus support runs with Melanie Martinez and Artemas. The raven, she keeps reminding people, stands for change and rebirth. She used it to close a chapter, then flew.