The Sun Never Sets on Zara Larsson
Nearly a decade after the domination of “Lush Life,” Sweden’s brightest export is burning hotter than ever with her upcoming album Midnight Sun.
- Published on
by Cam Delisle
Photos by Charlotte Rutherford and Lewen Han
Zara Larsson is wrapped in a glittery pink tracksuit and strutting in rhinestoned flip-flops when she rolls into Vancouver’s Beat Street Records. She’s very much embodying pop star off duty: styled to look like she didn’t think twice (she did), like she’s exactly aligned with how the flickering LED overheads catch her lacquered gloss and glass-cut highlighter. Heads turn, but she walks through the aisles like it’s nothing new, flipping through a stack of early-2000s pop—Britney, Beyoncé, a scuffed-up copy of Mariah’s Rainbow—with the admiration of someone surveying a lineage she’s actively a part of.
In a few hours, she’ll hit the stage for her second night on Tate McRae’s Miss Possessive Tour. Her infectious new single, “Midnight Sun,” is in a sweet spot—out just long enough to be familiar, but still fresh enough to feel like a discovery. Built over a euphoric Jersey stomp with longtime collaborator MNEK, it arrives in the heart of her set and lights the room. By the next morning, TikTok makes it look like Larsson was the headliner.
The single is everywhere. Her stage presence has the internet hooked after only a single stop on tour, yet none of it rattles her. She’s funny, earnest, and crystal clear about what she wants—treating this moment like a job she’s trained her whole life for. Which, in her case, isn’t far off.
Born and raised in Stockholm, Larsson was a prodigy—winning Talang (Sweden’s version of the Got Talent franchise) at just 10 years old and outgrowing the child star label almost immediately. By her teens, she had surpassed the usual pop star script, mixing Euro-pop precision with an international restlessness. What looked like a meteoric rise was actually a slow, steady grind, as she built the instinctive self-assurance that she still carries today.
Her new album Midnight Sun leans fully into that intuition, becoming her most cohesive work yet. “I feel like this is the first proper album roll-out that I’ve ever had,” she explains. “[My] first album, So Good, was just a collection of singles that I dropped over a period of time. This album is the first time that I’ve had a concrete plan and vision on how I want to do things.” It’s the difference, she says, between wandering a city and navigating it with purpose—and Larsson’s finally holding the map.
The results are already stacking up. “Crush,” the record’s third single, dominated U.S. pop radio as the #1 most added track. Her “Pretty Ugly” video earned a VMA nomination for Best Choreography. Night after night on tour, she moves like someone who knows exactly who she is—and where she’s going. “In my head, I’m always like, ‘This is a number one, you know? Like, this is a Grammy,’” she admits. “It’s the classic: ‘Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.’ The time before releasing something new is always so exciting, so I try to just let it happen.”
Midnight Sun borrows its name from a natural phenomenon native to Larsson’s mythic north—a place where the sun refuses to set and golden hour stretches into eternity. Beyond the celestial reference, the album glows with something warmer: a luminous study in self-devotion, joy, and presence. “It’s really just about my love for life and being alive,” she says. “The wind in your hair, the grass between your toes, listening to a good playlist, watching a beautiful sunset.” That awe for the everyday—filtered through her Scandinavian roots and sharpened by internal fluency—makes Midnight Sun feel less like a set of singles and more like a blueprint for embracing life itself.
Recorded exclusively with a single team of producers (MNEK, Margo XS, Zhone, and Helena Gao), the album carries a unified sonic identity. “We created this package of sounds that we would use in all of the songs,” she says, instinctively wandering toward bins of 90s R&B, albums that resonate with a similar cohesion. The record’s palette is synthetic but unstable: house piano warped like heat rising off asphalt (“Hot & Sexy”), percussion that jitters and collapses in on itself (“Girl’s Girl”). Within that container, Larsson begins to pull apart the edges of the persona she’s built.
“One of my favourite tracks on the album is called ‘Saturn’s Return,’” she says, framing the track’s existential weight in a single lyric: “I’m not young enough to know everything anymore.” “In the last verse, I talk about how I used to have no patience—I’d say things like, ‘When I hit 20, I’m gonna be playing stadiums.’ Now, I’m not there yet, and that’s okay. I’ve accepted that I can change the deadline.” The track scratches the surface of uncertainty, but elsewhere, she probes those fissures with even tauter precision.
“There’s another song called ‘The Ambition,’ that talks about my relationship with comparison,” she says, flipping past the glossy sleeves of her fellow pop peers’ records. “I saw some discourse online about the pop girls and I just got so annoyed. It just made me feel like, ‘What does she have that I don’t?’ and vice versa.” Online scrutiny is constant for women in music—especially when touring alongside another powerhouse like Tate McRae. “Even on TikTok, I see a lot of people comparing Tate and I, and it’s really hard to ignore that sometimes.” Still, she recognizes the power in coexistence—two artists with different energies and distinct goals, both complicating what it means to hold space as women in pop right now.
A TikTok of Larsson crate-digging at Beat Street racks up nearly 200,000 views in days. It’s a reminder of why she continues to resonate: not just for the bangers, but for how she treats pop like it actually matters. Fresh off previewing Midnight Sun before its official release, she casually drops details about her new video for “Crush,” featuring a lovestruck spider biting her and triggering what she calls a “really sexy allergic reaction.” If that doesn’t spark curiosity about the next version of Zara Larsson the world is about to see, it’s hard to know what will.
Zara met RANGE at Vancouver vinyl haven, Beat Street Records, where she fawned over iconic pop girls and ’90s power ballads. Check out Zara’s picks below:
An Album by An Artist You Want To Collaborate With:
BRAT – Charli xcx
“I love that she’s just the most authentic version of herself, she’s a pioneer.”
An Album That Reminds You of Your Childhood:
My Love Is Your Love – Whitney Houston
Did you know: Zara’s studio beginnings trace back to a duet of “When You Believe,” recorded with her sister.
An Album You Wish You Made:
B’DAY – Beyoncé
“‘Upgrade U’ might be one of my top Beyoncé songs.”
An Album That Makes You Emotional:
30 – Adele
An Album That Inspired Your New Album:
SOS Deluxe: LANA – SZA
“She’s really doing her own thing, which I think is something that everybody can be inspired by.”
An Album You’d Give To Someone Who’s Never Heard Pop Music Before:
Greatest Hits: My Prerogative – Britney Spears
“Now this is just hits on hits on hits.”
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