A bashful 11-year-old named Crystal had a question for Zara Larsson: “How did you become the perfect star?”
Onstage, the singer — Barbie-like in a neon-pink tube top and flowing blond extensions — giggled into her bedazzled mic while a small group of VIP fans awwed. They had assembled in the cavernous, gilded hall of the Brooklyn Paramount for an “intimate pre-show hang” with Larsson, where she dutifully performed two acoustic songs and took questions.
Later that March evening, a swarm of tweens, teens and gay millennials in glitter descended on the theatre for the second of Larsson’s two concerts there, during which the singer, aided by four backup dancers and an overworked wind machine, treated them to 90 minutes of pop spectacle with arena-size ambitions.
To the question at hand, Larsson offered an earnest answer about how people shine when they do things with purpose.
Stardom is a topic on which she has recently gained some authority: That week, Stateside + Zara Larsson — the fizzy remix of PinkPantheress’ Stateside that caught fire after American gold medallist Alysa Liu skated to it at the Olympic exhibition gala — climbed to No.6 on the Billboard Hot 100.
In February, she attended the Grammys as a nominee for the first time. And on TikTok, concert clips of fans dancing onstage to her 2015 song Lush Life had been going viral for months.
She’s also promoting her latest album: Midnight Sun, a sexy, propulsive collection of maximalist dance-pop released in September. Recently, Larsson dropped Midnight Sun: Girls Trip, a stack of remixes featuring pop titans like Shakira and Robyn as well as prominent peers like R&B singer Kehlani and City Girls rapper JT. The record’s guest list is one of Larsson’s “biggest accomplishments”, she says, because “it’s like getting co-signed” by her favourite artists and “the people that raised me”.
Larsson, 28, is by now a music industry veteran. She won a reality TV talent competition in her native Sweden at age 10, signed a record deal at 14, released her debut album at 16, and scored a hit, at 17, with Never Forget You, a pathos-laden EDM power ballad.
But just a year ago, she was toiling in pop’s lower-middle class. The kind of attention she had attracted early in her career — and which is bubbling around her again now — seemed like a distant dream, both to her and to the online pop fanatics who, in their ruthless taxonomy of pop artists, often deemed her a “flop”.
“In everything relating to my musical achievements, I rarely feel like ‘Yay’,” Larsson said in a documentary released last year. “I mostly feel like ‘What’s this? This is terrible’.”
Midnight Sun, her fifth album, was a determined effort to course-correct.
“I stopped focusing so much on what I thought other people would want from me or what I thought radio would want, and just started focusing on what I wanted to do,” she says during an interview in the lobby of her downtown Brooklyn hotel. “And that’s just, ironically, when people start caring.”
Fresh-faced and low-key in sweats and flip-flops, Larsson is chatty and unguarded about the challenges she has faced in the industry and the scale of her dreams — topics that surface on her album, too, where she has a writing credit on every track.
On The Ambition, a rattling, percussive confessional, she lays out her predicament of being “raised on validation / consumed by aspiration”. And Saturn’s Return, the upbeat record’s only true ballad, contains this account of milestones missed: “When I was 17, I didn’t have no patience / Said by 20, I’d be filling up stadiums”.
She is particularly proud of Saturn’s Return. For a singer who has not always been involved in the songwriting process, the candour and specificity of the lyrics feel fresh. Larsson attributes this to the trusting environment she cultivated with the close-knit group that worked on Midnight Sun, including her Never Forget You co-writer MNEK, along with newer faces like producer Margo XS and singer-songwriter Helena Gao.
Larsson has said she never again wants to be in a studio with only men; surrounding herself with primarily female and queer collaborators around her age satisfied “a need and urge to feel understood without having to explain myself”, she said.
“I think I’m able to bring her sassy side out,” MNEK, reflecting on their relationship, says in a phone interview. “There’s a trust there because I’ve known sis for, like, 12 years. There’s a clear camaraderie.”
That camaraderie was painfully absent in some of the rooms in which Larsson found herself early in her career: She says she was often talked over and made uncomfortable by collaborators who would invite guests — and even strippers.
“When I turned 18, I felt like people were moving differently,” she says, as if they had been “just waiting, which is so creepy”. She adds: “It just feels so much better to create your own little crew, and not to feel like I have to chase, ‘Oh, this person did this No. 1’.”
Margo XS, who performs as part of the raucous dance music duo deBasement, came aboard because Larsson was looking to go “a bit more left of centre” with her sound, Margo says in a phone interview. To whet Larsson’s appetite, she made her a wide-ranging playlist of electronic music, bouncing from the lush techno of Placid Angles to the UK garage of Sunship to the warped trip-hop of Arca’s Stretch 2 project. Margo also brought on Gao, who is Chinese Danish and connected with Larsson over their Nordic heritage.
One of the foursome’s first sessions in London began with Larsson talking about her summer home in Sweden. “That’s when this idea of ethereal Scandinavian music started to emerge,” Margo recalls. The session yielded the album’s title track: a euphoric drum-and-bass song about the idyllic time of year when the northern Swedish countryside is in perpetual twilight.
At the Brooklyn Paramount, Larsson’s fans looked as if they had just returned from summer vacation: Many sported faux hibiscus flowers in their hair, or airbrushed T-shirts that looked like boardwalk souvenirs. (The singer wore one reading Sun Kissed in the video for Midnight Sun.) Larsson says she had long dreamed of people being able to identifiably dress as her for Halloween. That goal feels more attainable now, given her album’s bold visual aesthetic, straight out of 2005 — butterflies, plastic bangles, candy-coloured eye shadow and all.
But perhaps the most potent symbol in Larsson’s iconography is the dolphin, and not entirely by her own design. In 2024, Larsson caught a wave of attention from a widely circulated meme featuring saccharine, rainbow-streaked images of dolphins paired with dissonant, depressive captions like “I have social anxiety”. The meme’s soundtrack — Symphony, a sunny 2017 song by electro-pop group Clean Bandit, featuring Larsson’s vocals — played up the irony. Symphony hit No. 1 on Billboard’s TikTok Top 50 chart that August.
Larsson pointed out her affinity for dolphins predates all of this — she has two inked on her right ankle, a friendship tattoo from when she was a teenager. Rather than distancing herself from the viral moment — or leaning too hard into it — Larsson simply “accepted the dolphin into my universe”, she says. She commissioned Lisa Frank, fairy godmother of 1990s schoolgirls, whose kitschy, Technicolor designs were a clear inspiration for the dolphin imagery, to create a special-edition album cover for Midnight Sun. Still, Larsson denies that the meme was explicitly “on the mood board” for Midnight Sun, citing references like Madonna’s Ray of Light and early 2000s internet aesthetics instead.
In the era of TikTok, virtually any artist can become an internet phenomenon overnight. What matters more is whether they can sustain the momentum. Seasoned artists like Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter recently cracked into pop’s mainstream after years just outside the spotlight, in each case with the help of a viral episode. Both singers had already accrued a wealth of experience recording, touring and promoting their music, giving them the necessary stamina to run with the attention once it came their way.
For Ezekiel Lewis, the CEO of Epic Records, the difference between an artist who can’t meet the moment and one who can boils down to “track proposition” versus “artist proposition”. Lewis, who began working with Larsson as her A&R in 2021, says in a phone interview that the singer had long shown strength in the first category, as evidenced by the renewed popularity of older songs like Lush Life and Symphony. But it took more time for her to develop a compelling artist proposition — to see the “build-up of a magnetic field around her”, he says.
It also took a bit of shamelessness. MNEK notes another artist in her shoes might have hesitated to take a supporting slot on a younger, less experienced artist’s tour, as Larsson did last year when she opened for Tate McRae. But Larsson wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to play Madison Square Garden for the sake of pride. She is an unabashed self-promoter and a prolific poster; one representative TikTok from her time in New York featured her twerking to a Midnight Sun remix inside a bodega.
“I think if I couldn’t sing, I would probably be more successful as an influencer,” she jokes. “Nothing is embarrassing for me. If something is cringey, I’m like, ‘That’s iconic’.”
Larsson’s warmth and lack of inhibition is a draw for fans and colleagues alike. “It’s very refreshing being around a pop star that is OK with not being perfect,” South African singer Tyla, a guest on Girls Trip, writes in an email. “She doesn’t try to be.”
Or as Larsson put it on Saturn’s Return: “It feels so good to know I don’t know what I’m doing.”
That lyric lands differently now, in light of her recent successes. The Saturn’s Return remix on Girls Trip is stretched across six mystical minutes, with new guest vocals from Gao and a tonal shift from contented acceptance to something more like triumph. The line from the original version about filling up stadiums by age 20 is missing, as is the more equanimous couplet that followed it: “Didn’t happen so I changed the deadline / Might take another 20 years, that’s fine.”
Larsson never wanted to wait 20 more years — and, seemingly, she won’t have to. In the caption of an Instagram dump recapping her second night in New York, the singer previews a long-awaited milestone: “Right before the show I had a meeting with my agents to see what date we can book Madison square garden for. . .” she wrote. “Life is crazy.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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