Nessa Barrett's headline tours have quietly done double duty as the dark-pop scene's farm system. Isabel LaRosa got her first major support run on Barrett's sold-out, 20-date Young Forever Tour in February and March 2023. Ari Abdul opened the 50-city Aftercare World Tour in 2025. And in 2026 the ladder extends upward: Barrett herself takes the support slot for The Neighbourhood, one of the bands she credits with making her want to do this at all.
Labels used to run this kind of development pipeline. In this scene, the headliners run it themselves, and nobody has run it longer or more consistently than Barrett.
How did the Young Forever Tour launch Isabel LaRosa?
When Barrett booked her first headline run behind her debut album Young Forever (October 14, 2022, No. 80 on the Billboard 200), she gave the direct-support slot to Isabel LaRosa, then still in the earliest stretch of her career. The tour sold out across its 20 dates in February and March 2023, and the routing included a stop at New York's Terminal 5 that generated its own press for the opener: Melodic Magazine's review of that night ran under the headline that Isabel LaRosa “haunts” Terminal 5.
That is the whole mechanism in one headline. A sold-out room, an audience already primed for dark, cinematic pop, and a nineteen-song wait during which the opener gets to make her case. Barrett followed the run with the Church Club for the Lonely Tour later in 2023, keeping the machine warm between albums.
What did the Aftercare World Tour do for Ari Abdul?
Two years later Barrett scaled the same play up. The Aftercare World Tour, launched around her second album Aftercare (November 15, 2024), ran 50 cities in 2025 with support from Sombr and Ari Abdul, and was later extended to Australia.
For Ari Abdul, whose catalog grew up on TikTok the same way Barrett's did, that is 50 rooms of exactly the right listeners. The pairing was not an accident of booking; it was a match of worlds. Barrett's audience arrives dressed for the aesthetic, fluent in the references, and ready to adopt the next artist who speaks the language.
In dark pop, the support slot is the label deal: the headliner decides who gets developed next.
Why does the support slot matter so much in this scene?
Because almost nobody here was built by radio. Barrett converted one of TikTok's biggest followings, which peaked past 16 million, into a catalog Warner's own March 2026 press materials value at nearly 3 billion global streams and more than 27 million followers across social networks. Her openers are on the same trajectory: viral catalogs first, live audiences second. The tour is where a phone-screen fanbase becomes a ticket-buying one, and a headliner who shares her stage is effectively transferring trust that took years to earn.
The ladder also keeps connecting back to itself. Isabel LaRosa, who got her first big run under Barrett in 2023, opened Artemas's 16-date LOVERCORE Tour in early 2026, playing rooms like the Hollywood Palladium and, fittingly, Terminal 5 again. One artist's opener becomes another artist's opener becomes, eventually, a headliner with openers of her own. The whole scene is one long relay.
Who develops the developer?
In 2026 the answer arrived: Barrett is direct support on The Neighbourhood's Wourld Tour, the band's first major tour in over five years, across a Europe and UK leg from August 24 to September 12 and select US arena dates from November 10 to December 4. The band is cited as a major influence on her decision to pursue music, which makes the booking the same story she has been writing for others, told one level up: the established act hands the stage to the artist who grew up on them.
Barrett has been explicit about what she wants the cohort she is building to look like. “I hope that with time, more women feel empowered to be loud, be hot, and be successful all at the same time,” she told TEN Magazine in 2024. On the evidence of her tour posters, she is not waiting for time to do it. She is booking it herself, one support slot at a time.