Ari Abdul (born Arianna Abdul, October 6, 2001) is an American dark-pop singer and songwriter from South Brooklyn, New York, signed to Slumbo Labs/RCA Records. Her debut single “Babydoll”, recorded on a whim by a business student who had never sung for anyone, went viral as a sped-up edit, earned an RIAA Gold certification plus Gold in France and New Zealand, Platinum in Poland and Silver in the UK, and has passed 600 million combined streams. Her catalog total exceeds 947 million, her TikTok crossed 1 million followers in 2026, and her self-titled debut project arrived with Grammy-nominated producer Stint and partner Ella Boh.
Raised in South Brooklyn, Abdul grew up in a loud, eclectic musical house: an Ecuadorian mother playing Latin records, a Costa Rican father partial to classic rock, older brothers deep in hip-hop and metal. She picked up guitar young, moved to electric at 14, and wrote private grunge songs inspired by Nirvana that she was too scared to show anyone. She never studied music; after graduating high school in 2019 she enrolled in college for business and marketing, where a chance meeting in her first year changed everything: aspiring producer Thomas LaRosa, who had just landed a studio internship, bonded with her over Tumblr-era alternative, The Neighbourhood, Arctic Monkeys, The 1975. Neither of them was studying music: “we didn’t go to school for music at all... we were actually both studying business, I was doing marketing.”
The stage name is no invention: “Ari” is simply short for her first name, and her Instagram handle, @arianna.abdul, uses her full name. Her earliest TikToks went out under the handle imaginary.ari. Her family was not involved in pushing her toward music, she has said, but is now “super supportive,” and she names talking to her mom as one of the things that keeps her grounded on the road.
By her own telling, it was Thomas’s mom’s idea: “his mom was like, ‘Why don’t you guys make a song?’” Abdul was skeptical (“I don’t sing... who’s gonna listen to it?”) and thought her voice was too deep, “but that day we just went for it.” The session happened in 2021 at the studio where Thomas interned; accounts differ on the exact month (she has cited both July and August). The song, finished with Thomas and his sister Isabel LaRosa as co-writers, initially died on TikTok: “no one cared, no likes, no comments.” Then, in December 2021, she posted a sped-up version: “the next morning I woke up it was so viral... I was getting emails from record labels.” Or as she put it elsewhere: “I went to bed as some girl who hung out with a friend and woke up with calls and emails.”
The official release came February 22, 2022; the Slumbo Labs/RCA deal followed; she dropped out of college. The certification was her first ever, and the song kept compounding long after the viral week: Kworb tracking now shows the sped-up version past 315 million Spotify streams and the original near 294 million, more than 600 million combined for one song. A KDDK remix followed in July 2022 and a Chinese-language remix with 希林娜依·高 in June 2023. Thomas LaRosa remains her most frequent producer to this day (“he still produces to this day and he has like most of my songs”), and the two released a duet, “Sinners,” on September 7, 2022.
The debut EP Fallen Angel (October 7, 2022), named for her favorite Wong Kar-wai film, spawned “Stay” and “Taste” and a sold-out UK/Europe promo run; its art direction came from designer Elyn Kazarian with photography by Oswaldo Cepeda. By that November she was already at roughly 393,000 TikTok followers and 3.36 million Spotify monthly listeners. The singles kept coming through 2023: “Bored,” “You” (an early Ella Boh co-write), “Haunt Your Dreams,” “Worship,” and “Make Me Cry” with Deadbeat Girl.
Her first headline tour, 2023’s eight-date HELLGIRL Tour, sold out entirely, London within a day of announcement: Velvet Underground in Toronto (September 11), The Moroccan Lounge in LA, Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, then Helios 37 in Köln, Privatclub in Berlin, Melkweg in Amsterdam, La Boule Noire in Paris and The Camden Assembly in London (October 3). That August she played Lollapalooza’s BMI Stage (Saturday, August 5, on a stage bill with Los Aptos, Arcy Drive, Windser, Danielle Ponder and Aidan Bissett), one of her first two “real” shows, days after a warm-up with Suki Waterhouse; Isabel LaRosa played the same festival that period, a first-major-festival moment for both friends.
The CCTV EP (October 13, 2023), six tracks in a lean 15:55, turned sudden hyper-visibility into a surveillance-horror concept; Zero Nine Magazine dubbed it her “villain arc” and Clash called its lyrics “replete with nods to horrorism.” The credits map her producer bench beyond Thomas LaRosa: “Who Were You With Last Night” by Russ Chell, “Bury You” by Wyatt Bernard (and co-written with Mikky Ekko), “Last Breath” by Robopop, “Slow Dancing” by Dwilly. 2024 brought “DFHMPU,” released February 22 on the same day the God’s Watching Tour was announced, the co-headline run with Isabel LaRosa, plus sold-out headline shows in China that summer; 2025 an opening slot on Nessa Barrett’s Aftercare World Tour (The Met in Philadelphia, The Wiltern in LA), the club-leaning single “Dreams,” and the Change Tour, extended to the UK and Europe in 2026.
The self-titled debut project, made with Stint (HEALTH, Demi Lovato, Gallant) and Ella Boh, marks her most exposed writing: “LEAVE ME HERE” (July 11, 2025), about childhood trauma and abandonment, keeps a real scream in the bridge. “While making CCTV, I was still scared to be open about myself... This project no longer has that mask. It’s just real to me.” She has framed the whole era as therapeutic: “This new chapter for me, in life and music, is all about being vulnerable and almost uncomfortable. It’s like therapy in a way.” The rollout ran “Alive” (June 2025, co-written with Ajay Bhattacharyya and Ella Boh), “No Fair” with Ella Boh (August 2025), “MINE” (October 2025), then “So Good,” “Ego” and “ENAMORED” (June 12, 2026) into the album era.
Abdul self-identifies as dark pop and credits the city: “there’s this kind of gloominess in New York which I feel has reflected in the music.” The themes are obsession and possession, “Bury You” is “about being so obsessed that it’s possessive... you want to bury them with you and be with them forever”, and “Taste” pulls from comic-book imagery for what Rolling Stone UK called a “gothic tale of out-right infatuation”, filtered through a deliberate 2012-2015 Tumblr sensibility: The Neighbourhood, Lana Del Rey, Billie Eilish, Melanie Martinez, Marina. She has named Shakira’s “La Tortura” and Lana Del Rey’s “Ride” video among her formative visual touchstones, and describes a “dream-noir” sound shaped partly by childhood cartoons.
She writes for multiple readings by design: “With most of my songs, I want them to have multiple interpretations so people can relate to them and translate them in their way.” Her videos run horror-forward: “Bury You” (directed by the duo aaro, Taylor Kahan and Spencer Moore, produced by Sam Houston) imagined a straitjacket and “pure insanity” executed as “high fashion and high energy,” and her CCTV-era editorials (styled by Yasmin Sabri, shot by Liam Bundy) put Maison Margiela and Simone Rocha against the surveillance concept. Her stated philosophy is intuitive: “I have always just stayed true to myself, and I naturally did what I thought looked cool... For CCTV, I definitely played more into the storytelling but all these upcoming visuals are just rawly me.” Her songs have landed in Fashion Week shows two years running without her prior knowledge: “I got sent footage and I had no idea that my songs were featured.” One private ritual made it into print: she listens to “What Once Was” by the band Her’s every time her plane takes off.
“I am pretty much Hispanic, Latina, Arab,” she told one interviewer: her mother is “full Ecuadorian,” her father Costa Rican and half Palestinian, the source of the Abdul surname. Her official bio puts it the same way: “Her Ecuadorian mom listened to Latin albums, while her Costa Rican dad preferred classic rock.” Rolling Stone UK framed her as bringing “her Ecuadorian and Middle Eastern roots into the alt scene,” and she has pointed out that Latin America is one of alt music’s biggest audiences, with her comment sections full of Spanish-speaking fans; she has also spoken about being one of relatively few Latin and Middle Eastern artists in a traditionally white-coded alternative genre.
They met around 2022 in a writing session (“Ella is a very talented writer and has helped me write so many songs... We wrote Slow Dancing”), then co-wrote roughly thirty songs across “You,” “DON’T,” “Girls on the Internet,” “Let the World Burn,” the Presley Regier “Questions” remix and more, many still unreleased: “technically we have been collabing for the last two years,” Abdul said on a December 2024 live. The romantic partnership went public with the May 2025 duet “out of order”, released on Boh’s Milk & Honey EP via Bamboo Artists; “No Fair” (2025) is written about their relationship. Boh now produces and creative-directs Abdul’s records; the Songwriters Hall of Fame profile puts it flatly: “Ella is locked in producing dark-pop breakout artist Ari Abdul, managing creative direction with the same intensity she brings to her own records.” They live together, co-stream regularly (their TikTok lives double as the fandom’s primary news source), and announced Abdul’s 1-million-TikTok milestone on a live from tour in April 2026. On a January 2026 stream Abdul described their day-to-day as inseparable: “we fully live alone together... but our lifestyle is that of like a 12-year-old boy.”
Label: Slumbo Labs/RCA since 2022. Management: Dawn Barger at Foundations (the company behind Laufey). Booking: Wasserman Music (Ash Mowry, Zac Bluestone, Alex Hardee, worldwide). Publishing: Work of Art. PR: Slate PR, credited alongside Slumbo Labs/RCA in her CCTV-era press. Her Chris Grey collaborations released through Rebellion Records represent cross-label licensing between the RCA system and the independent world. Her Fashion Week placements have so far been organic syncs rather than announced deals. Notably, she has no confirmed entry on the Billboard Hot 100 or any official chart: the Gold plaques and 947-million-stream catalog were built entirely on streaming and TikTok, not radio.
Abdul has a dedicated fan subreddit, r/ariheads, whose threads run from birthday celebrations and tour excitement to chart-watching and memes; she also surfaces in r/popheads release threads and in recommendation threads that group her with Artemas and Dutch Melrose as “toxic, obsessed alt-pop.” The fan community even documented the strange physics of her streaming numbers: a January 2024 r/ariheads thread tracked her monthly listeners swinging from roughly 99.6 million down to 79.5 million within days, an artifact of holiday viral spikes and Spotify’s periodic filtering; her sustainable baseline sits in the 5.9 to 6.7 million monthly-listener range with roughly 835,000-855,000 Spotify followers.
Press-wise, Rolling Stone UK profiled her as “the New York rockstar taking over the internet,” Clash and Zero Nine Magazine framed CCTV as horror-literate concept work, Stardust Magazine gave the self-titled era a cover story, and tmrw put her in its print issue #52. Of the one-hit fear she has been disarmingly honest: “For a long time, I had this anxiety about never beating it or just having that one song, but over time, I’ve truly fallen in love with just making music.” The flip side is a genuine convert’s enthusiasm: “I’ve always been the fan girl that idolizes the artist.”
The Isabel LaRosa thread runs through everything: Isabel co-wrote “Babydoll,” brother Thomas produced it, the two co-headlined 2024 and still guest on each other’s records (Abdul co-wrote Isabel’s “My Girl”). She features on two Chris Grey records, the “Let the World Burn” remix with G-Eazy (November 2024) and “Death Won’t Do Us Part” (November 2025), with Grey crediting her “haunting softness that made everything so much more emotional” and calling the partnership one that grew “my career and the label side by side.” Other features include Two Feet’s “Kill Anyone,” Jutes’s “Red Velvet” and a Beach Weather “Hardcore Romance” remix. Reddit’s recommendation threads group her with Artemas and Dutch Melrose as “toxic, obsessed alt-pop,” her career was accelerated by the same Nessa Barrett tour system that boosted Isabel, and her streaming-first Gold with no chart entry mirrors the path of NUMB.
| Year | Record |
|---|---|
| 2022 | “Babydoll” certified RIAA Gold, her first certification, off the back of the December 2021 sped-up viral run |
| 2022-25 | “Babydoll” adds Gold in France (SNEP) and New Zealand (RMNZ), Platinum in Poland (ZPAV), Silver in the UK (BPI) |
| 2026 | BABYDOLL (Speed) passes 315M Spotify streams; the original sits near 294M: 600M+ combined for one song |
| 2026 | Catalog passes 947 million total Spotify streams (Kworb); baseline 5.9-6.7M monthly listeners, ~835-855K followers |
| 2026 | 1 million TikTok followers, announced live on stream with Ella Boh in April; up from ~393K in November 2022 |
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2001 | Born Arianna Abdul, October 6, in Brooklyn, New York |
| 2016 | Around age 14-15, switches to electric guitar; writes private Nirvana-inspired grunge songs she shows no one |
| 2019 | Graduates high school; enrolls in college for business and marketing; meets Thomas LaRosa in her first year |
| 2021 | Records “Babydoll” on a whim at Thomas’s studio internship (summer); the sped-up version explodes overnight in December |
| 2022 | “Babydoll” officially out February 22; signs Slumbo Labs/RCA; drops out of college; Fallen Angel EP (October 7); “Sinners” duet with Thomas |
| 2023 | Lollapalooza BMI Stage (August 5); sold-out 8-date HELLGIRL Tour; CCTV EP (October 13), the “villain arc” |
| 2024 | God’s Watching co-headline tour with Isabel LaRosa; sold-out China shows; “Let the World Burn” remix with Chris Grey and G-Eazy |
| 2025 | Opens Nessa Barrett’s Aftercare World Tour; “out of order” with Ella Boh makes the relationship public (May); “LEAVE ME HERE”; Change Tour; signs with Dawn Barger at Foundations |
| 2026 | Change Tour UK & Europe; 1M TikTok followers (April); “So Good,” “Ego,” “ENAMORED” carry the self-titled era |
Arianna Abdul, born October 6, 2001 in Brooklyn: 24 as of mid-2026. “Ari” is simply short for her first name; her Instagram handle @arianna.abdul uses the full name.
Yes: Slumbo Labs/RCA Records, since the “Babydoll” explosion in early 2022. Management is Dawn Barger at Foundations, booking is Wasserman Music, publishing is Work of Art.
Thomas LaRosa, the college friend who recorded “Babydoll” with her, has produced most of her catalog. The self-titled project era added Grammy-nominated producer Stint and Ella Boh, who also handles creative direction. CCTV brought in Russ Chell, Wyatt Bernard, Robopop and Dwilly on individual tracks.
Yes. They met in a writing session around 2022 and were songwriting partners for years first; the relationship went public with the duet “out of order” in May 2025, and “No Fair” is written about it. They live and work together.
No. Isabel is Thomas LaRosa’s younger sister, which made her a “Babydoll” co-writer before her own career took off. The two are Slumbo Labs/RCA labelmates, co-headlined the 2024 God’s Watching Tour, and still write on each other’s records.
Not on any official singles chart: every commercial milestone, including the RIAA Gold for “Babydoll” and five international certifications, was earned through streaming and TikTok rather than radio play.
Her own words: “My sound is probably dark pop.” Press has called it alternative pop, dream-noir, and horror-inflected pop; she ties the gloom directly to New York.
| Year | Title | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-26 | Ari Abdul (self-titled era): Alive · LEAVE ME HERE · No Fair (feat. Ella Boh) · MINE · So Good · Ego · ENAMORED · Dreams | Album era | Prod. Stint & Ella Boh |
| 2024 | DFHMPU · DON’T · Girls on the Internet · Sexy Spooky Skeleton (feat. Ella Boh) | Singles | |
| 2023 | CCTV (You Belong to Me · Who Were You With Last Night · Bury You · Bite Marks · Last Breath · Slow Dancing) · Bored · You · Haunt Your Dreams · Worship · Make Me Cry (feat. Deadbeat Girl) | EP · Singles | “Villain arc” |
| 2022 | Fallen Angel · Babydoll (RIAA Gold) · Stay · Taste · HUSH · Sinners (feat. Thomas LaRosa) | EP · Singles | Debut year |
| Feats | Kill Anyone (Two Feet) · Let the World Burn remix (Chris Grey/G-Eazy) · Questions remix (Presley Regier) · Red Velvet (Jutes) · Hardcore Romance remix (Beach Weather) · Death Won’t Do Us Part (Chris Grey) | Features | 2023-25 |
On this site: Ella Boh, her partner, producer and co-writer · Isabel LaRosa, the co-writer turned co-headliner · Nessa Barrett, whose Aftercare tour she opened · The Neighbourhood, the Tumblr-era godfathers she bonded with Thomas over · Artemas and Dutch Melrose, her neighbors in the toxic-alt-pop map · and NUMB Goes Gold, the parallel story of a streaming-first Gold record by Christian Gates.