For as long as she can remember, Isabel LaRosa was fascinated with ravens. The more she looked back at the adolescence she’d recently left behind, she saw them everywhere. Sitting in treehouses writing short stories about birds, listening to avian podcasts with her mom, the vast folklore surrounding them, even her hometown heroes the Baltimore Ravens. After struggling to find a title for her debut full-length, it suddenly seemed obvious. Raven was a way of spiritually, if not literally, self-titling her new album. The perfect way to sum up all the experience that brought her to this moment.

Raven is a long-awaited line in the sand, the big statement after early years in which LaRosa experimented with her sound and experienced an organic yet meteoric ascension. Before she even graduated high school, LaRosa signed to Slumbo Labs/RCA Records and soon released two EPs, 2022’s i’m watching you and 2023’s YOU FEAR THE GOD THAT LOVES YOU. On the strength of viral hits like “i’m yours,” her music stoked wildfire buzz online. Still in her late teens, she’d amassed over a billion streams across audio platforms and was named one of Spotify’s Pop Rising Artists To Watch in 2024. After pausing for a moment, the writing for Raven was like the floodgates opened anew — much of the album completed rapidly as LaRosa’s life changed around her, many of its standout tracks materializing in the months just before its release.

“I wanted to make sure this was right," LaRosa says. “This is an embodiment of who I am as an artist.”

Though LaRosa is just 20, she’s already been building to this for over a decade. She grew up in a musical family in Annapolis, sitting at the piano and learning jazz standards with her father accompanying on saxophone and her brother Thomas on guitar. The three would perform at various jazz jams and open mics around town, the LaRosa siblings cutting their teeth as small children. Then, as Isabel and Thomas reached their early teen years, they developed a love for alternative and pop music alike, and began writing songs together. With the pandemic derailing LaRosa’s high school years before they even got started, she and Thomas honed in on their musical ambitions, splitting time between Annapolis and Brooklyn while crystallizing their vision. As soon as school was out of the way, they decamped to LA and began trying to find their footing in the city’s music scene.

The familial bond strengthened the LaRosas’ artistic connection, with everything about Isabel’s project — the aesthetic, the songwriting, the videos and visual style — carefully crafted by her and Thomas. “Sonically, it sounds like what I like,” she says simply. But the music on Raven toes the line between the mainstream pop world and its shadows, arriving at an alternate universe driven by nocturnal synth throbs more akin to the Drive soundtrack than contemporary Top 20. Above each alluring arrangement she and Thomas created, LaRosa wove tales of relationships and fallouts, love and loss. Her breathy, whispery vocals pulled listeners in, like they were being let in on a clandestine confession from a friend.

Last year, LaRosa returned with the single “Favorite,” a bilingual track riding on a warped reggaeton beat that soon made waves on radio and TikTok alike. “Favorite” ended up being a sort of skeleton key for Raven, though not as a template to follow. Rather, the song made LaRosa feel as if she had a completely open palette to explore, and she became bolder in pushing the edges of her sound. “It felt like we could try so many different things now,” LaRosa reflects. “We tried to not be paralyzed by decision fatigue. We just wrote stuff and followed what we thought was cool, what landed.” Through a mixture of rampant inspiration and the excitement of digital-era immediacy, the two saw Raven come together into 14 tracks ready to be released soon after they’d put the finishing touches on the album.

Though that might make Raven seem a flurry of snapshots from a frenzied time in which LaRosa tumbled from youth into adulthood while mounting a music career, she sculpted the arc of the album with as much intention as everything else she does. “I wanted it to be a progression,” LaRosa begins. “It starts off lighthearted, the beginning stages of falling in love.” Much as LaRosa’s work thus far has been a sort of real-time coming-of-age, so too does the narrative of Raven travel from nascent infatuation and the dizziness of early adulthood, to the growing pains of first heartbreak and grief.

In its earliest moments, Raven offers bangers that sound like a young person first stepping out into the night and seeing all it has to offer. The woozy chorus of “Good Girl” or the throb of “Pretty Boy” capture the euphoria and exhilaration of lust and crushes. As the album proceeds, love deepens, and then twists, and LaRosa starts navigating the moments when we grow distant from one another, betray each other. “Hope It Hurts” imagines what the collapse will feel like. Along the way, she wrestles with life’s rapid changes. On “Home,” she reflects on her family moving out of Annapolis and the sense of having to create a new home when the physical one is no more. “Cry For You,” written shortly after LaRosa went through her first major breakup, indulges the pent-up anger of the grief cycle. But by the end, in “Burning,” she has come around to sadness and acceptance and growth. “I definitely lean into coming-of-age topically,” she explains. “I feel like I’ve grown up fast, that I’ve grown up so much in the past few years.”

“I’ve written about heartbreak a lot recently because I’ve experienced it,” she continues. “The album is first love and first true heartbreak. It’s cathartic.”

This is what’s made LaRosa resonate with her generation so far: her ability to navigate the murky waters inherent to that “coming of age” happening deep in the digital era and in historically complex years. On Raven, she filters that into music that is addictive, transfixing, and more emotionally raw than she’s ever been before. As any great debut, it’s an introduction to everything she’s capable of. But with her already lauded career, it’s also the latest conversation in an ongoing discourse with a devoted audience.

“Raven is for the fans who have been around for a long time, a representation of everything about me and what I’ve gone through,” LaRosa concludes. “It feels so much more open to me than my other music. I hope people can find comfort in another person’s experience. I hope people can find whatever they need in it.”