Two of dark pop’s defining careers run through one producer: Thomas LaRosa. His best friend Ari Abdul and his younger sister Isabel LaRosa both signed to Slumbo Labs/RCA Records in 2022, both broke out with songs he produced, and both still list him among their closest collaborators. One friendship, one family, one boutique imprint: this is the most tightly linked artist pair in the scene, and the quiet producer who connects them.
Where did Thomas LaRosa come from?
Before he was anyone’s producer, Thomas LaRosa was a jazz kid. His father, a hobbyist jazz musician who “always kind of wanted jazz musician kids,” brought the family to jazz clubs and open mic nights, and Thomas accompanied on guitar while Isabel, four years his junior, sang standards from around age seven. He started writing his own songs at 11, and Isabel followed his lead. Years later, as a college student, he landed an internship at a local recording studio, the room where everything changed.
That is where the friendship comes in. During her first year of college, Abdul, a South Brooklyn marketing student with no music background, met Thomas and bonded over Tumblr-era alternative: The Neighbourhood, Arctic Monkeys, The 1975. In 2021 she visited him at the studio and, at his mom’s suggestion, recorded a song on a whim. That song was “Babydoll.”
One song, three names on the credits
The writing credits on “Babydoll” read like a family photo: Ari Abdul, Thomas LaRosa, and Isabel LaRosa, who co-wrote the track before her own career had fully ignited. Isabel is credited on three songs from Abdul’s debut EP Fallen Angel: “Babydoll,” “Stay” and “Taste,” plus the sped-up versions. When the sped-up “Babydoll” exploded on TikTok in December 2021, it carried all three of them with it: the song went RIAA Gold and now sits past 600 million combined Spotify streams.
The label mirrored the friendship. Isabel had self-released her debut single “16 Candles” in September 2021; by February 2022 she was signed to Slumbo Labs/RCA while still finishing high school. Abdul’s deal with the same imprint landed the same year. Two artists, one producer, one label, within months of each other.
How deep does the partnership still run?
For Isabel, Thomas is not a collaborator so much as a constant. “Thomas produces everything... We write everything together... I would not be here without him,” she told Karma Magazine, and elsewhere: “I always say he’s the other half of my brain.” He held sole or lead production credit across her entire catalog until her 2025 debut album Raven became the first project to bring in outside collaborators at all.
For Abdul, he remains the backbone of the discography. “He still produces to this day and he has like most of my songs,” she told Popternative in 2023, and the two even released a duet, “Sinners,” on September 7, 2022. Her producer bench has since widened, CCTV brought in Russ Chell, Wyatt Bernard, Robopop and Dwilly, and the self-titled era added Grammy-nominated producer Stint and Ella Boh, but the foundation is LaRosa’s.
One studio internship produced two catalogs.
The universe keeps expanding
The connections have never stopped compounding. In 2024, Abdul and Isabel co-headlined the God’s Watching Tour across North America, labelmates and friends sharing top billing. In 2023 they had played Lollapalooza in the same period, a first-major-festival moment for both. And the writing credits still flow both directions: Abdul co-wrote Isabel’s 2025 summer single “My Girl” alongside both LaRosa siblings.
The scene has other one-producer partnerships, but none that built two careers simultaneously from a single social circle. A jazz-club kid from Annapolis and a marketing student from Brooklyn, connected by an internship and a mom who thought they should make a song: that accident of proximity now accounts for well over a billion streams between the two artists, and neither shows any sign of outgrowing the person who recorded them first.