{"id":354458,"date":"2025-12-17T18:49:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T18:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/354458\/"},"modified":"2025-12-17T18:49:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T18:49:13","slug":"zara-larsson-lets-stay-right-here-in-the-sunshine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/354458\/","title":{"rendered":"Zara Larsson | Let\u2019s Stay Right Here, in the Sunshine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\/AADNEVIK<\/a> dress. MISHO<\/a> cuffs.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one is powerful like a pop girl,\u201d Zara Larsson, Swedish songstress and global pop music phenom, utters to me with her palm extended in the air, face as serious as death. She closes her hand, finger by finger: \u201cTo me, the main pop girl Zara Larsson | Let\u2019s Stay Right Here, in the Sunshine has never been a joke. People care about you a lot. People talk about you a lot. You sell a lot of records. You sell a lot of tickets. You have the masses like this, right?\u201d She brandishes her fist and shakes it, a grin creeping across her face. \u201cIn my world, no man has that power.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s become increasingly clear that Zara Larsson\u2019s world is one far more inhabitable than the one in which we currently reside. In Larsson\u2019s benevolent realm, open to the public this September via her fourth studio album, Midnight Sun, the darkness of night never overtakes, girls are allowed to make silly, stupid mistakes, and friends dance close on the dance floor over Jersey Club beats and scream Tiffany Pollard monologues from the back of Escalades, triumphantly: \u201cBEAUTIFUL! FLY! HOT! and SEXY!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\/MAISON MARGIELA<\/a> coat. CHRISTIAN SIRIANO <\/a>dress. MISHO<\/a> cuffs.<\/p>\n

Tonight though, as she guides me through this glittery terrain of her own design, Larsson is physically speaking from Copenhagen, a stop on her headlining European fall tour following a summer spent supporting Tate McRae stateside. We\u2019re 10 days out from the announcement of her Grammy nomination for Best Dance Pop Recording for \u201cMidnight Sun,\u201d the titular, earworm-inducing single from her eponymous album, and we\u2019re 17 years out from Larsson\u2019s entry into the public eye as the cherub-faced ten-year-old in a blue dress who won Talang (Sweden\u2019s Got Talent) by belting Celine Dion\u2019s \u201cMy Heart Will Go On\u201d in a clear, boisterous soprano.<\/p>\n

Zara Larsson is one of the most interesting popular musicians today for a number of reasons: largely because she\u2019s well into her second decade on the global stage and she\u2019s not yet 28, and because she\u2019s one of the few Gen Z pop stars whose career has stretched through the rise and regularization of The Algorithm. Larsson signed to a record label in 2013 and released the single \u201cUncover,\u201d which quickly took hold of Scandinavian radio charts and catapulted her to Nordic stardom. In 2015, at the age of 17, she released \u201cLush Life\u201d and \u201cNever Forget You\u201d\u2014her first international megahits, which spent a combined 26 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. Larsson\u2019s sound, in retrospect, defined the era\u20142017\u2019s So Good distills a specific temporal feeling, one of the last vestiges of true Radio Pop before the modern internet secularized the business. Think: soaring vocals; EDM synths; theatrical drops; buoyant drums. Larsson spent the cusp of her adulthood collaborating with giants of the dance-pop epoch: Clean Bandit, Kygo, Alesso, David Guetta.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/AADNEVIK<\/a> dress.<\/p>\n

Larsson\u2019s early collaborators have since peeled out of the mainstream\u2014due to shifting cultural interests, perhaps, or a generational gap. \u201cI never really felt like I had peers. I only had adults and grown ups,\u201d she admits of her early career. \u201cI\u2019ve always felt respected, but it\u2019s just different when you create something with people who actually relate to you, who understand you, who get my, like, references,\u201d she giggles. She\u2019s talking about her ongoing collaboration with creative partners and peers MNEK, Margo XS, Zhone, and Helena Gao, who worked on the Midnight Sun album together and to whom she credits the beating sonic heart of the album. After working with them, she realized: \u201cIt\u2019s supposed to feel easy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\/CALVIN KLEIN<\/a> tank top and shorts.MAISON MARGIELA<\/a> sneakers.<\/p>\n

And by \u201cgetting references,\u201d Larsson seems largely to speak of (and speak almost exclusively in) the amorphous meme vocabulary engineered by small cultural ingroups within the digital realm and proliferated later to the masses via their For You Pages. Last year, the singer saw an absurdist online revival of her early single \u201cSymphony,\u201d in a meme that involved the \u201cI just want to be part of your symphony\u201d chorus looping over an image of a Y2K-looking, Lisa Frank-esque joyful dolphin cartoon, gesturing toward a feeling of wholesome, unmitigated joy.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/\u00a0DIESEL<\/a> top. MISHO<\/a> earring.<\/p>\n

The reception of the image\u2014and the subsequent revival of the song\u2014shepherded a new sort of fanbase into Larsson\u2019s sphere of influence, one demonstrably younger and far more online. She\u2019s leaned into the opportunities the virality has gotten her, using the meme across moodboards for Midnight Sun, the imagery for which seeks to evoke a general effervescent affect as opposed to conveying something concrete. \u201cThat is my dream,\u201d she says of the newer, teenaged audience dressed in Zara Larsson drag. \u201cTo have people being able to step into a universe that we can just be in together.\u201d Zara Larsson\u2019s universe evidently involves \u201cflowers in [the] hair, wearing sparkly colors, [having] the dolphins, key chains, the like.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the kind of fanbase that has invigorated a career that was becoming increasingly alien to Larsson before she parted ways with her record label of ten years, gained ownership of her masters, and began releasing via her own label, Sommer House. It\u2019s the kind of It\u2019s the kind of fanbase that will understand and chuckle at the fact that she tells me, \u201cI do feel like I\u2019m breaking free of the Khia Asylum. I\u2019m scratching on the door. I have been locked up in Khia Asylum.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\/CALVIN KLEIN<\/a> tank top and shorts.MAISON MARGIELA<\/a> sneakers.\"\"\/AADNEVIK<\/a> dress.<\/p>\n

For anyone who hasn\u2019t been chained to a phone screen for the past three years, this means Zara Larsson is on the ups. She\u2019s not relegated to the bureaucratic no-man\u2019s land of downward mobility in the industry, a hapless fate befallen by so many but (perhaps not surprisingly) only leveraged as a joke against talented female pop stars. Larsson (who, at one point in her early career, ran a now untraceable Swedish language blog in which she was notorious for \u201cman-hating,\u201d which resulted in vitriolic backlash and death threats), is in on the gag. Actually, she loves the gag.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like my whole career gets to be alive 1765997347\u2014it\u2019s a thing that\u2019s living and has lore and story\u2026that\u2019s obviously because of internet culture,\u201d she says. Her only regret, really, is that people may at times take \u201cSymphony\u201d out of context. \u201cIt used to be this very beautiful, still upbeat, but quite emotional song. It has such a beautiful video as well, which is very emotional. And now, I mean, all people think about are dolphins,\u201d she sighs.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/DSQUARED2 <\/a>jacket and dress. MISHO<\/a> earrings and necklace.<\/p>\n

In the great tradition of Swedish pop music, such paradoxes can be located in a great deal of Larsson\u2019s catalogue, including Midnight Sun tracks \u201cThe Ambition,\u201d which reckons with the pressures of competition in the realm, or \u201cSaturn\u2019s Return,\u201d where she laments, \u201cBetter let it unfold (cause I\u2019m not young enough) \/ \u2019Cause I\u2019m not young enough to know everything anymore.\u201d Larsson, like a long list of predecessors\u2014ABBA and Ace of Base and Avicii and The Cardigans and Roxette (and contemporaries Robyn and Tove Lo and Lykke Li)\u2014know how to drench melancholia in danceability. It\u2019s the Swedish way.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/DIESEL<\/a> top and skirt. MISHO<\/a> earring.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Swedish pride is the Max Martin of it all,\u201d she asserts of the cultural output of the country, whose entire population is comparable to that of Los Angeles County but whose musical output per capita puts our city to shame. \u201cBut if you are interested, I think you can [and should research]. You have access to anything, because it\u2019s all there. Yung Lean is an icon, you know, the whole Sad Boys crew. A lot of people forget, I think, how much the [Sad Boys sound] did for underground rap, SoundCloud music, and that whole genre,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/\"\"\/HERVE LEGER<\/a> dress.<\/p>\n

What Larsson brings to the pop genre\u2014has brought to the pop genre since her inception\u2014is a dry and unabashed tendency towards honesty. She\u2019s not raw, per se (\u201cI wouldn\u2019t say [my music] is organic at all. None of the instruments are real instruments\u2014it\u2019s all very digitally produced,\u201d she volunteers when asked about the sonic landscape of her project), but she\u2019s made it abundantly clear that she has nothing to hide. The Zara Larsson you see onstage draped in tropical hues, contorting her body above a bed of professional dancers in front of crowds of thousands is the same Larsson you\u2019ve seen online, offering her opinion on geopolitical conflicts via Instagram story, shoving her foot and calf into a condom to prove that men shouldn\u2019t claim that they\u2019re too big for one, is the Larsson you\u2019ll meet via Zoom on a Monday evening, hunching in a corner over a phone screen because the charger is too short and she\u2019s had a phone die on Zoom \u201ctoo many times.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shouldn\u2019t we all be so lucky to live in a world in which we\u2019re told the truth, for once? Maybe it wouldn\u2019t be so hard if we stuck around for a bit here, in this gentle universe where the night never comes, all of us adorned in glitter and keychains, orbiting faithfully around our radiant and undying star.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/VIVIENNE WESTWOOD<\/a> dress.<\/p>\n

Photographed by Damian Foxe<\/a><\/p>\n

Styled by Elad Bitton<\/a><\/p>\n

Written by Annie Bush<\/a><\/p>\n

Hair: Werner Amort<\/a><\/p>\n

Makeup: Saba Khan<\/a><\/p>\n

Digital and Lighting: Finn Waring<\/a><\/p>\n

Retouch: LoveRetouch<\/a><\/p>\n

Stylist Assistants: Eden Molen<\/a> and Gabriella<\/p>\n

Location: Sir Prague Hotel<\/a><\/p>\n

\u200d<\/p>\n