Singer Zara Larsson’s pop career had stalled, but a big second act awaited

NEW YORK – A bashful 11-year-old named Crystal had a question for Zara Larsson: “How did you become the perfect star?”

Onstage, the Swedish singer – Barbie-like in a neon-pink tube top and flowing blonde extensions – giggled into her bedazzled mic while a small group of VIP fans aww-ed. 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 millennials in glitter descended on the theatre for the second of Larsson’s two concerts there. The artiste, aided by four back-up 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 British singer PinkPantheress’ Stateside (2025) that caught fire after American gold medalist Alysa Liu skated to it at the Olympic exhibition gala – climbed to No. 6 on the US Billboard Hot 100.

In February, Larsson attended the Grammys as a nominee for the first time (Best Dance Pop Recording for Midnight Sun). And on TikTok, concert clips of fans dancing onstage to her 2015 song Lush Life had been going viral for months.

She has also been promoting her latest album Midnight Sun, a sexy, propulsive collection of maximalist dance-pop released in September. On May 1, she 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 said, because it was like getting co-signed by her favourite artistes and the people that raised her.

Veteran at 28

The 28-year-old 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 (2015), a pathos-laden electronic dance 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 artistes, often deemed her a flop.

“In everything relating to my musical achievements, I rarely feel like ‘Yay,’” Larsson said in the 2025 Prime Video documentary Zara Larsson – Up Close. “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 said 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 was chatty and unguarded about the challenges she had 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”. 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 that 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, said 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 said 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 said, as if they had been “just waiting, which is so creepy”.

She added: “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 said 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 XS 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 XS recalled. 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.

Seizing the moment

In the era of TikTok, virtually any artiste can become an internet phenomenon overnight. What matters more is whether they can sustain the momentum.

Seasoned artistes like Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter recently cracked 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 Epic records chief executive Ezekiel Lewis, the difference between an artiste who can and cannot meet the moment boils down to “track proposition” versus “artiste proposition”.

Mr Lewis, who began working with Larsson as her A&R (artistes and repertoire) representative in 2021, said in a phone interview that the singer has long shown strength in the first category, as evidenced by the renewed popularity of older songs like Lush Life and Symphony (2017).

But it took more time for her to develop a compelling artiste proposition – to see the “buildup of a magnetic field around her”, he said.

It also took a bit of shamelessness. MNEK noted that another artiste in Larsson’s shoes might have hesitated to take a supporting slot on a younger, less experienced artiste’s tour, as she did in 2025 when she opened for Canadian singer Tate McRae.

But Larsson was not 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 joked.

“Nothing is embarrassing for me,” she added. “If something is cringey, I’m like, ‘That’s iconic.’”

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 the light of her recent successes. The track’s 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 will not have to. In the caption of an Instagram dump recapping her second night in New York, she previewed 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.” NYTIMES