written by NICOLAIA RIPS
photography YASMINE DIBA
styling MIMI WADE
Zara Larsson, held aloft on stage by three beautiful women in booty shorts, legs soaring over her head as she sustains the signature riff on her Grammy-nominated song “Midnight Sun.” It’s the kind of performance stunt that’s meant to showcase exactly what an artist is capable of. It’s the kind of talent years in the making.
This past September, the Swedish pop star released Midnight Sun, her fifth studio album. What’s followed has been career-defining: That first Grammy nod. A feature on the remix of PinkPantheress’s “Stateside,” so popular it outperformed the original. An instantly recognisable visual universe. Larsson goes viral basically every other day, whether that’s for her politics (pro-Palestine, pro-abortion, pro-immigrant, pro-LGBTQ, anti-ICE), her dancing (it’s serious), her vocals (also serious), or even her makeup. By October, she launched her own clothing line, Main Rose. By February, she began her headline tour across the United States. (As of last year, Larsson was Tate McRae’s opening act.)
Zara Larsson spent a decade being a mid-tier pop star. If you’re between the ages of 12 and 35, you’ve probably heard one of her songs, even if you didn’t know it. Now, she’s finally broken through. And if I had to pinpoint the exact moment the winds shifted, it would probably be the dolphin.
In August 2024, TikTok user @heiratet posted Lisa Frank-style dolphins set to Larsson and Clean Bandit’s song “Symphony,” alongside the caption, “I’m depressed.” The friction between the poptimistic aesthetic and the deadpan message took off online. The original video has been viewed over 4 million times, while other users have put their own spin on it, adding their own misanthropic captions. (“I just paid for my lobotomy with Kohl’s Cash.”) It became a funny symbol of ennui; an emotionally fraught moment wrapped in synthetic velour.
Currently, Larsson is between legs of her tour and is back at home in Stockholm. She’s wearing a pink hoodie, hair pulled slick to her scalp. She looks clean and flushed, radiating good health. Midway through, her boyfriend, dancer and choreographer Lamin Holmén (“I’ve been touring stateside / Kissing my Swedish boy over FaceTime”) brings her a plate of food and she’s delighted. Is that a snack plate? She’s quick to correct me: “A full meal!”
“I was like 15, openly talking about how I hate men.”
Larsson got her start as the precocious 10-year-old winner of the Swedish version of Got Talent. Watching her rendition of “My Heart Will Go On” induces goosebumps; there’s a performer able to channel depth beyond her years. She was quickly signed to a record label and spent the ages of 11 to 26 putting out a variety of hits (“Ruin My Life,” “Never Forget You”) and misses (Venus). At 17, she dropped “Lush Life,” a Rihanna-influenced electropop jam that charted in the top five in 17 countries and became a record-shattering bestseller in Sweden. There have been euphoric moments, and times she almost quit. What’s changed is the amount of control Larsson has.
“My true passion has always been to perform and to entertain and to be an experience in front of other people. Now I feel like it has changed a bit, going from searching for outside validation to just creating,” Larsson tells me. She is clear-eyed about the journey. “It was hard. I had amazing people who were helping me and have always listened to me, but being 14 in a room full of 40-year-olds, it’s kind of impossible to experiment and find out who you are.” It’s not that she isn’t grateful—it’s just that there’s no good way to come into yourself in the public eye.
“One day, I wasn’t the youngest person in the room anymore.” In 2022, Larsson bought back her masters and launched her own production company, Sommer House. “Although I love to perform, it feels so much more meaningful to perform something that couldn’t have been made without me.”
Unlike past albums, Larsson is billed as a co-writer on Midnight Sun. It reflects that change in priority—a deliberate act of artistry, not a studio product Frankensteined together for maximum marketability. “I don’t think, to be personal, it has to be super sad. That’s not who I am. I can’t take myself too seriously.”
Critical to her stardom is her ability to embrace the stupid things—from the depressed dolphin meme to custom Labubus—and turn them into something novel. She’s also hyper-online. I ask Larsson to check her screen time; it’s 16 hours a day. Before I can even ask where she spends most of that stretch, she tells me with resignation, “It’s TikTok.”
“Being called a flop, like, 50 times a day is like, ‘Oh, damn, I’m a person.’”
X, meanwhile, has become app non grata. Part of the reason is her stint in the “Khia Asylum,” an internet insider term for where “flops” are put out to pasture. It’s not impossible to make it out of the asylum: Dua Lipa’s broken free, Sabrina Carpenter’s made it, Brat propelled Charli xcx into first-name status. If anything, would Charli xcx be the artist she is today without the years she spent refining her craft? Is it an asylum, or pop star boot camp, the 10-year grind that makes an overnight success?
Like most things in Larsson’s life, she’s in on the joke. In a recent interview, she declared she was officially out of the Khia Asylum. Still, the barrage of negativity can be draining. “Being called a flop, like, 50 times a day is like, ‘Oh, damn, I’m a person.’ I’m also a comment reader. I’m always checking the comments: ‘What do people think about this? How is this landing? Why are they feeling this way?’ I just love that.” I tell her she should try out Substack. She considers it. “Maybe! I used to run a blog. It was controversial for the time. I used to write a lot about feminism. I was like 15, openly talking about how I hate men. Nowadays, I feel like everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, duh!’” Of the current state of pop star Substacks: “Sometimes I feel like people are trying so hard to sound like writers, with really big words. But some people are amazing. I love Doechii’s. I really like Charli’s too. But some people I’m like… ‘It’s okay. Be yourself.’”
In addition to the tour, Larsson is working on the deluxe edition of Midnight Sun, slated to come out sometime in March. She’s tapped a lot more female artists. “I’m shy about asking for features, but you have to put yourself out there, and you have to be ready for a lot of people to say no. They say, like, ‘Oh, I can’t, my schedule.’ Sometimes it’s really because of their schedule, and sometimes it isn’t.” She’s skilled at the DM slide. For “Stateside,” Larsson tells me she DMed PinkPantheress one word: Queen. And then PinkPantheress responded: Queen. Larsson laughs, “I wrote to a lot of girls that day, just like, ‘Queeeeen.’” She loved shooting with PinkPantheress for the remix music video. “We swap aesthetics. I do the whole plaid British thing, and she becomes the Midnight Sun girl.”
The Midnight Sun girl, for the uninitiated, is an early-aughts island babe, a Malibu Barbie baddie. Early tour looks have spotlighted an impressive mix of independent designers, like Ireland’s Sorcha O’Raghallaigh, the UK’s Paul Aaron, and Mallorca-based brand Alineo Studio. Larsson is confident in the current direction. “I’ve always wanted to be accepted by the fashion community, because they’re really the people who decide what’s cool or not. But now, I don’t want to be invited to a Fashion Week show because I wore the right designer to a red carpet. I want to be invited because I have a hit song, and it’s good press that I’m there!”
Compared to the Zara Larsson of five years ago, it feels like she’s ageing in reverse, having shed the weight of external expectation. She’s able to capture and capitalise on something those of us who have come of age online are intimately aware of—the disconnect between how you think you’re supposed to be and who you actually are. And like the dolphin, it’s not about bending to either pole but embracing the combination.
Larsson smiles at me. “It just has to come from within, and I’m the source. Now it’s like I can’t really flop, because if you create something and you love it, that’s a win in itself. And if people aren’t enjoying it, then I don’t know—that’s not really my problem.”
hair FITCH LUNAR USING VIRTUE AT OPUS BEAUTY
makeup KENNEDY USING KIKO MILANO AT STREETERS
nails ANALYSSE HERNANDEZ USING OPI AT OPUS BEAUTY
set design LIZZIE LANG AT WALTER SCHUPFER MANAGEMENT
prop stylist PETER GUERACAGUE
photography assistant SOPHIA LIV MAGUIRE
styling assistant DRE ROMERO
production THE MORRISON GROUP
production manager CECILIA ALVAREZ BLACKWELL
production assistant DEVIN BOOTH
post production CAMERIN STOLDT