FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Zara Larsson

FEATURE:

Modern-Day Queens

Zara Larsson

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I did actually write about…

the superb Zara Larsson recently, in the context of Chappell Roan. Roan was criticised for seemingly having a bodyguard tell a young fan to stop bothering her or keep away. It turns out Roan knew nothing of this and the bodyguard had nothing to do with her. Regardless, people piled onto her and there was this backlash. Zara Larsson spoke in an interview about how it seems these people (mainly the media) just really hate women. This continuing trend of women in music being criticised more heavily then men and there being this ingrained misogyny that is not shifting. I am not going to go back over that. Instead, I want to shine a light on Larsson. One of the biggest Pop artists in the world, she is not talked about as highly as others. I think she is one of the most consistently interesting and brilliant artists. A strong role model and someone who is strong and independent. Her latest album, Midnight Sun, was released last year. I will get to some interviews around that and also bring in a more recent interview. I’ll also include a review for the tremendous Midnight Sun. One of the standout Pop albums of last year. For anyone who does not know about the Swedish-born artist, she released her debut album, 1, in 2014. I think there was a lot more talk around her music when her third album, 2021’s Poster Girl, was released. She is this consistently artist who followed that with the phenomenal Venus in 2024. However, I feel Midnight Sun is her finest album to date and this is someone who continues to grow stronger with each album. She is inspiring so many of her fans and other artists. This incredible voice in music that I feel we need to talk about more. Zara Larsson is someone who sees herself as an activist. She is a huge fan of Beyoncé. Modelling herself after her in a sense, Larsson is an incredible feminist and this amazing figure that speaks up against evils and oppression. Criticism the Israeli genocide in Palestine and tackling ICE and their regime in the U.S., this is someone who does get involved politically. Someone who stands with trans people and the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ and is pro-choice. Against the lack of abortion rights and the criminalisation of abortion in the U.S.

There are a few 2025 interviews to get before a review of Midnight Sun, prior to wrapping up with an interview from this year. I’ll start out with Vogue and their interview with Zara Larsson from last summer. She talked about her confident and vulnerable new album. It was interesting when she was asked about Swedish Pop legacy and how she feels about that:

“You then progress into these really candid tracks, “The Ambition” and “Saturn’s Return,” which navigate the competitiveness of the pop world and giving up control. Can you talk about how you make such vulnerabilities feel pop?

I wanted to show the journey I’ve been on to understand that I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m not sure what I want in my life, and that’s okay. I’m not as successful as I want to be, but I’m growing. As a young woman in the pop industry—and I started very young—dreaming big is everything. So is competition. You’re encouraged to be competitive and I wanted to actually confront that. I’ve deleted some social media—Twitter—from my phone because that validation is like a drug to me. Comparing myself to other people was too. As pop girls, we love the craft, we’re passionate about the music, but real talk: you’re also wanting to be a star that’s playing the big stages and on the radio. That’s getting awards. I don’t think ego is good or bad, it’s just reality. I’m very competitive, and it’s hard being in an industry where your work is subjective and things can flip so quickly. I can be that girl and then…flopiana.

How has that evolved with age? Is pop always engineered that way?

I experienced huge success at the very beginning of my career, but I didn’t take it in or stop to feel happy. I wanted hit after hit. Like, okay, I just did this stage, but next time, I want 40,000. I want 50. That girl over there’s doing 50! I’d leave the stage and think I never gave enough. It took the fun out of it. I feel I’ve landed somewhere different. I have my drive and ambition, but I’m also happy with the rhythm of life. I look around and let myself be inspired by others—to develop as an artist, rather than comparing myself. And maybe, sometimes, I wish I romanticized moving out to the countryside and having lots of babies…but I know I’d still have that itch.

How has working with friends and peers changed things?

Well, that’s never really happened before. I’ve always been the youngest in the room, and because of that I never truly felt that connection I needed when writing songs with people in the early days, even if everyone was amazingly talented. Like, yeah, Rick Nowels is amazing…but he’s also 64, know what I mean? I’m working with women and friends who know my references, and we can have honest conversations that make beautiful music. That’s how these songs started and how we wrote three songs a day. I’ve never felt as involved in my own music.

How in tune with the Swedish pop legacy do you feel?

I’m turning 28 soon, so I’m allowed to be nostalgic here! Stockholm will always be home, and I’ve come to appreciate those summers that shaped me. The long winters of darkness and melancholy make you appreciate summers like nowhere else. And that’s a metaphor for life that I’ve trained myself on: Be present for the good things, make your own vibe. I was really inspired by Swedish folklore when I started writing this album—images of nymphs with long blonde hair staring into blue lakes. Then I added aesthetics of my own: glittery, colorful, fashion vibes. I’m always inspired by Swedish pop—it sounds polished and fun, but we’re also crying on the dance floors.

My digital footprint was defined by the “Symphony” meme of the dolphins. I thought, damn, I love it. How can I incorporate it into my world? It actually really inspired the album moodboard—animated animals, rainbows. Nature but silly”.

Arguably, Midnight Sun was the standout song of summer 2025. I would definitely put it in the top three. Heralding the creative dawn of Zara Larsson, The Line of Best Fit had a long and compelling talk with her. There was a lot of justified excitement around Midnight Sun. It is an album that “mixes the serious with the silly – and it's easiest and truest music she’s ever made”. You wonder just how far this modern Pop great can go. Like I said, she is an artist that is not talked about as much as she should:

“The world came serendipitously, in the form of a meme. Last year, TikTok users were pulling “Symphony”, her song with Clean Bandit, out of the pop graveyard and into a technicolor world of smiling dolphins and rainbows. She put the dolphins in her shows at the time, but when it became big, “I didn’t know how to capitalise off of something like that. I spent so much time online, of course I was aware of what was happening. That’s so fun, to be inspired by something that happens [online]. And people might associate that with me now.” She decided to cement her brand in a way she had never done before. The video for “Midnight Sun” is basically a continuation of that Barbie summer energy, brought to real life: Larsson in a boardwalk-ready top dancing in cerulean water below a vibrant sunset or in a lush forest, stickers, dolphins, and butterflies eclipsing the camera. “I’m a little nymph who found her way into the city, but still going down to take a swim on lunch break,” Larsson says about the vision.

“When you look at the numbers, and you compare them to previous single releases, it’s kind of flopping,” Larsson says. “But I feel like culturally, people are really connecting with it.” Call it an underdog story, call it hard work paying off, but people are finally discovering her back catalog and realizing that a plethora of incredible pop awaits. Better yet, her upcoming album is filled with summery, electro-pop hits that feel true to her; this is the first time she co-wrote every song on an album. This is what matters, Larsson says, and growing up has shifted her perspective. “I want real people to care about the things I’m doing and feel they can relate to that or feel inspired in some way. Who cares about a Spotify playlist? I feel a different energy, and it’s so rewarding, because this album feels so me.” During studio sessions, she declined when people pulled up the Hot 100 to see what was trending: “Let’s lock in!”

The record — Larsson’s best by far — is a soundtrack to a Swedish summer night whose passing is ameliorated by the fact that another one is on the horizon. It’s a party album that doesn’t try to imitate its predecessors, but injects seriously fun songs with intimate, conversational lyricism. Mid-album showstopper “Saturn’s Return” is a cavernous, spacious ode to the mystifying ways of life, grounded by volcanic thuds and Larsson’s sweeping belt; right next to it is “Euro Summer”, a Balkan-pop anthem whose religion is skinny cigarettes and church is the beach. These songs coexisting isn’t a result of a fractured view, but a multifaceted personality worked into song.

PHOTO CREDIT: Shervin Lainez

That’s why the hype around the music is so personal — the record feels like a piece of her. With previous albums, she either didn’t write her own material or felt sidelined by the presence of industry veterans. “I was always the youngest person in the room,” she says after being signed at 14, and felt massive pressure after So Good’s singles blew up. “It’s very hard when you start out and you get huge amounts of success very early without cementing who you are artistically,” she says. “I just wanted to hold onto my success. I didn’t have a team that I worked with creatively. I didn’t write everything back then. I was looking outside of myself so much: ‘‘Who am I?’ What will they think?’ I think I’ve always had a vision, or a taste level. I just wasn’t confident enough in myself to trust it.”

But Midnight Sun is built from the ground up, constructed from a vision of a Scandinavian summer like no other — friends, family, fun, sex and cigs. “The more I travel, the older I get, there’s something that makes me really grateful for the way I grew up and where I’m from,” she says. She’s lived in the same house all her life, still keeps in touch with older friends. The magic of the midnight sun, the dreamy, cosmic phenomenon she captured in a live performance, was normal to her as a child, but after traveling the world, she understands how special it is. “A lot of people don’t know it’s a real thing,” she says. “They just think it’s a beautiful, symbolic thing I made up. But that’s my life, every summer was like that.”

The album is “spiritual,” she says. “It’s a love letter to life. The best thing that I know is to go out to my country house, an hour outside of Stockholm, and just be in nature. There’s so many beautiful things about growing up there. I just wanted to capture the essence of that more. I travel so much, just like, take me to a tree. Let me touch grass! There’s something so grounding to that. I get so emotional when I see a beautiful sunset. A beautiful cloud. It’s so beautiful and I’m so thankful to be alive, to be doing what I do.”

But prioritising fun doesn’t mean Larsson stays away from serious subjects; she’ll use a song as a Trojan horse for a deeper, more meaningful conversation. She’s been teasing “Hot & Sexy” on tour, a three-in-one Frankenstein song that combines bubblegum bass, Brazilian funk, and techno, narrated by Tiffany “New York” Pollard’s iconic Big Brother quote. It’s fun, it’s bouncy (“K-Pop down!”), filled with it-girl quips (“Get in the car, girl, we gon’ be late / Puss puss 97 on the number plate”), but after its dance break, something like anger starts to calcify. Part of the song was taken from a demo called “Let a Girl Live”, meaning being able to have drinks with your girls without some rude guy bothering you, but unfortunately, its meaning can be literal. “Tale as old as time, crime on womankind” she sings with her voice warped, “I’m done feeling like I’m prey / Watching my back everyday.” It gets real quickly, a reminder that outside the bright strobes of the club, a dark night awaits outside.

That song ends with the plea to “let a girl be hot and sexy,” which has a political element to it, too. No matter which way a woman dresses, conservative commentators on the internet will find a way to slot it into their binary view: a tradwife or a slut. “Me dressing up in this tiny dress and these uncomfortable heels, maybe I am conforming to the patriarchy,” Larsson admits. “Maybe I am just a girl who lives in a world where I’m trying to survive and have a good time and be cute because that’s what’s expected of me, but even if I do, just let me be!”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Charlotte Rutherford

Prior to getting to a glowing review of Midnight Sun, there is one more 2025 interview to include. Zara Larsson spoke with FADER about Midnight Sun and wanting a taste of being number one. Whilst you can’t hold and sustain that forever, she did yearn for that glimmer of gold. Midnight Sun was a chart success and debuted at number one in Larsson’s native Sweden. She is someone who is going to have a load of number one albums and continue to inspire and give strength to people around the world:

“The FADER: I have so many questions about the new era and the aesthetic. But first, “Midnight Sun.” How do you hold the note for so long? Is there a special technique?

Zara Larsson: [Laughs.] I always worry a little bit when I'm writing the songs because [I think], how am I gonna do this live? In the studio you can cheat and cut, but I was thinking I really want to do this live. We did it in the studio where you could just redo it a million times and I was kind of struggling in the studio, but when I go on stage and I hold the microphone and it's live, it's like something clicks in me. I just do things on stage that I never am able to do in the studio, like hold different notes or take a higher note than the one that I did in the booth. I don't know if it's the adrenaline, I don't know if it's the energy, I don't know if it's my listening, but something happens in me when I go on stage. You just hold a note.

I want to talk about the other side of this record, which is fun, but also gets very vulnerable. On “The Ambition,” you get very honest about how you feel about your career and your experience in the industry. There's this line where you say, “Everything is competition.” Do you feel like pop music specifically is inherently more competitive than other genres?

I don't really know what it's like for people outside of [pop music], but I would say from what I've seen, and how I feel, it gets really competitive, especially in pop, and especially with women. It's not even really the artists themselves always, it's like so many things around it as well. It's being compared by numbers and fans and awards and streams and tickets, it's just so many things to measure, but it's also weird because music is so subjective. What's better and what's worse, you can't really say because it's just a matter of style and taste.

I feel like I am a completely different person today than I was even three years ago. I'm at a place now where I don't feel like I have to compare myself to others because I'm so confident in what I have made and what I'm doing. But I also have deleted Twitter or X because I was just like, I can't be on here for my ego.

People love you on Twitter.

I will be up all night just scrolling and be like, oh fuck yeah. It's like a drug and it's like, the validation of it is like a drug, but I know one day, if it's not today, it will flip. I will do something that somebody doesn’t like, or they compare me to something, and then it will be like, “fuck this girl.” I just know that doesn't do me any well.

I am already competing with myself because I have done [music] for such a long time, so I'm also comparing the success that I had so early on with what I did after that. I had success and then flop, and then success and then flopiana, and now I'm like, I feel the success again. But I know it goes up and down.

I am keen to get to a recent interview with Zara Larsson. It is worth noting she is on tour at the moment, and actually comes to the U.K. next month. That is in Sunderland. She is then back in the U.K. in June. I am going to come to a review from CLASH. They said this about Zara Larsson’s incredible Midnight Sun:

“It’s difficult not to interpret Zara Larsson’s fifth album as a course correction.

Arriving only a year after ‘Venus’,a record that saw the Swedish star caught between delivering a visionary pop opus and preserving commercial vitality, ‘Midnight Sun’ feels like a return to form. Where its predecessor strained under that balancing act, this album offers no overarching concept or grand conceit, just wall-to-wall bursts of irresistible scandipop.

At just under 32 minutes, it’s Larsson’s shortest outing to date, and you immediately sense an artist trusting her instincts, fully uninhibited. Lead single ‘Pretty Ugly’ is the prime example: its feisty gang-vocal hook is destined to spend its time lodged in listeners’ heads for much of 2025.The track brims with an air of unfettered abandon, a feverish rush of house piano stabs and maximalist production. ‘Midnight Sun’ is better still, where glittering hooks and club beats converge during its chorus to serve up something relentlessly euphoric and hypnotic.

Reuniting with longtime collaborator MNEK – the British singer has production credits on each of the ten tracks here – has clearly reinvigorated Larsson, and her confidenceis palpable throughout. ‘Crush’ and ‘Eurosummer’ brilliantly fuse modern pop aesthetics and mass appeal with lean, astute writing, meanwhile reverberating walls of synthesizers bathe ‘Saturn’s Return’ in an opulent, hallucinogenic hue.

Ultimately, ‘Midnight Sun’ is Zara Larsson honing in on what she does best with laser focus: starry-eyed, joyous Scandi-pop built to ignite dancefloors as easily as festival sing-alongs.

8/10”.

I will finish off with a part of The Guardian’s recent interview with Zara Larsson. She has been what we might consider an underground talent for a decade or so. Now, with Midnight Sun, she is being proclaimed one of the biggest Pop artists. It is an important step forward. She has managed to do this without sacrificing her morals or sound:

“On a warm spring day, Brooklyn’s century-old Paramount theatre has been transformed into a base camp for all things Zara Larsson. Stage techs scurry past entourage members, managers furiously tap smartphones and various figures patiently await their moment with the Swedish superstar.

Down a plushly carpeted flight of stairs, Zara Larsson is on all fours, saying “puss puss” (Swedish for “kiss kiss”) into a camera. Despite all the craziness around her, she is locked in, wearing electric-blue stockings, tangerine booty shorts and a tiny blazer that makes her look like Malibu Barbie at graduation. A man powers up a leaf-blower, sending Larsson’s blond hair flying. After hitting a few poses, she tippy-taps over in maribou-trimmed stilettos and offers me a can of water. “Cheers!” she says as we clink.

Larsson’s career is moving at lightning speed and there’s not a moment to waste, or to indulge in much celebration beyond designer mineral water. In the week we meet, her irresistible spot on PinkPantheress’s Stateside has risen to No 1 on Billboard’s global charts after Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu’s viral routine to the track added fuel to what was already a white-hot six months for the Swedish star. At time of writing, Larsson has three songs in the US Hot 100 and is the fourth biggest female artist on global Spotify, behind only Taylor Swift, Olivia Dean and Raye.

Although she debuted aged 16 with the lovestruck ballad Uncover, everything changed for Larsson, now 28, with the release of September’s zeitgeist-hijacking album Midnight Sun. A flagrantly fun collision of brash electro-pop and drum’n’bass, the project reinvented her as a rave nymph: all dolphins and rainbows, rhinestones and lipgloss, tropical flowers and bare feet on fresh grass. Pop can seem like hard work in the age of chart gamification, “stan wars” and paparazzi-hounding, but Larsson makes it shimmer: a pop star who acts as if her duty is to provide joyful escape.

“I’m having the time of my life,” she beams as she kicks off her heels. She’s nearing the end of a six-week US theatre tour that goes viral nearly every night, thanks to her habit of inviting a fan on stage to dance to her 2015 single Lush Life (the song subsequently shot back up the charts). “The energy is amazing in these shows. But hopefully this is the last time I’ll do venues this size,” she says, arenas in her sights.

Part of what has made Midnight Sun so irresistible to fans – who call themselves Larssonists – is its genuine youthfulness: it is ultra-fun, uber-femme and whip-smart, evoking tan lines on chests, handprints on butts and skinny-dipping in the dark, all delivered in Larsson’s bright, startlingly powerful three-octave singing voice. “The change on Midnight Sun was my attitude,” she says. “I really evolved into a writer. People think personal songwriting is sad, on a guitar,” she says, making a “bleurgh” face. “But that’s not me.”

Midnight Sun embraces eurodance-pop, frenetic breakbeat and Baltimore club, as well as some fabulously cheesy accordion; the title track was nominated for best dance pop recording at this year’s Grammys. Larsson’s best lyrics have the immediacy of a voice note sent to a crush: “Look FaceTime / ’Cause my outfit so nice / And you say you love it ’cause it’s all see-through / Ooh!” At other moments, she is startlingly frank about her insecurities. Over stardust synths on Saturn’s Return, she reckons with her early ambitions hitting the skids. “Said by 20, I’d be filling up stadiums,” she sings. “Didn’t happen, so I changed the deadline / Might take another 20 years, and that’s fine.”

In the mid-2010s, Zara Larsson was a dependable B-list pop fixture, with a clutch of mega-streaming dance-pop collaborations with Clean Bandit, David Guetta and MNEK. These were stonking chunes that you could count on to get you through spin class, but which told you little about their big-voiced singer. Even recent albums – 2021’s Poster Girl and 2024’s Venus – did little to change that, feeling like overly focus-grouped grab-bags of trending sounds. In a scene in the recent documentary Zara Larsson: Up Close, the singer reflected on why her music was missing the mark. “A lot of people know the songs,” she said. “They don’t know I sing them. What the fuck is up with that? I’ve got the hits, but I’ve got no cultural relevance.”

“I think maybe I wasn’t an artist,” she tells me today. “I didn’t allow myself to do what I wanted to do in my soul. I don’t think I was allowing myself to even discover what that was, because I was so worried about whether radio would play it.”

She has since reconsidered her attitude, recognising that radio’s hit-making ability pales in comparison to the power of fans in the streaming era. “Who gives a fuck about radio?” she says. “I think radio at this time is just supporting what already exists.” It’s far more meaningful for Larsson as an artist – and as a brand – to see fans at her show wearing DIY spray-painted T-shirts and hibiscus flowers in tribute to her Midnight Sun look. That maximalism also finds Larsson barrelling closer towards the unapologetic camp of peers such as Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter, with an accessible twist: you can find most of your Larsson cosplay essentials at Claire’s.

PHOTO CREDIT: Charlotte Rutherford

Larsson has always been vocal about sex positivity – in 2015, she busted the myth that some men claim to be “too big” for condoms by getting her entire leg inside one – as well as women’s rights and her support of Palestine. She says that the latter has got her dropped from brand deals and awards shows. In 2024, she declined to perform at Eurovision’s halftime show in protest at Israel’s inclusion. “The older I get, the less I care,” she says of the lost opportunities. After buying back her master recordings in 2022 for what she calls a “sickeningly good deal”, Larsson is financially stable. She’ll still take sponsorship – she just did an ad for soy milk purveyors Alpro – but she says she’s not greedy. “I have a really amazing home in Stockholm. I have a beautiful summer house. I travel and I can eat at whatever restaurant I want.” She looks at me as if to say: what else would a 28-year-old need?

“Maybe pop stars aren’t thought of as people taking a stand,” she continues. “But if you constantly go against your inner compass and morals, you lose yourself as well.” In January, she inflamed Maga with a post that read: “I love immigrants … I love socialism, I fucking hate ICE.” A few days later the White House posted a pathetic riposte on TikTok set to Larsson’s hit Lush Life: “We love America First, we love deportations … we love ICE and our law enforcement!” She says she missed out on another deal last month after joking about abortion with a fan on social media.. “I lost $3m, which is the biggest brand deal I’d been offered in my life,” she tells me without a lick of remorse. “I was genuinely like: OK, losers!”

Larsson says that Midnight Sun’s cultural moment is a happy accident. It was a fan who paired her and Clean Bandit’s 2017 hit Symphony with kaleidoscopic dolphin art for a viral TikTok in 2024; Larsson just leaned into her marketing savvy to bring Y2K mermaid-core style to Midnight Sun. After fans started creating DIY versions of her airbrushed baby tees, she introduced a moment in her show where she spray-paints one for a lucky fan. Has she learned that her instincts are better than a record label’s? “Yes,” she replies instantly. “I get this weekly data update of my chart positions and monthly listeners from my label. And it’s not interesting to me to look at because that’s last week’s data. It’s already old. I want to ask, ‘What are we creating, what are we doing now?’”

She is putting the finishing touches to a Midnight Sun deluxe edition with all-women guest stars. Her label, Epic, “want me to release a new song before it drops to tease it”, she says. “And I’m like: it ruins the project and the specific rollout that I have planned.” It’s all a play for stats, which she finds depressing: “Playing the chart game is so dead to me. No one’s looking at the charts but industry people and maybe Taylor Swift fans.”

Sometimes fame can feel like a Faustian bargain, with scrutiny, sexism and presidential subtweets coming as part of the package. As her star has kept rising, Larsson has been wondering if there are limits to how much fame she can take. Could she handle it if she was as famous as, say, Chappell Roan, now in regular standoffs with the paparazzi? “The more people hate her, the more I love her,” says Larsson. “I don’t like how she’s being treated at all. When a woman has boundaries, I think people freak out. Men can do violent criminal things and people applaud them, but when a woman says, ‘Stop following me,’ it’s controversial? It’s like: you guys just hate women, actually”.

I shall wrap up there. Undoubtably one of the most incredible human beings in music today, Zara Larsson deserves all the success in the world. Midnight Sun was one of last year’s most memorable albums. A Deluxe edition will bring together some music queens. I am looking forward to hearing what comes from that. The more albums and songs she releases, the further and higher she goes. I feel Zara Larsson will one day be seen as one of the most influential and greatest artists…