“Am I just gay guy-ing or is this, like, abnormally good?” I texted a friend last summer along with the link to Zara Larsson’s “Midnight Sun” music video.
For those in the know (see also: gay guys), Larsson has been making essential pop for upwards of a decade. Early hits like MNEK collaboration “Never Forget You” and now-staple “Lush Life” seemed to indicate a trajectory toward becoming a mainstream fixture. And then “Lush Life” and “Ruin My Life” became hallmarks of retail playlists, that dreaded pop purgatory preventing the artists therein from achieving genuine cultural impact. Once “All the Time,” by all accounts a perfect pop song, failed to break through, it seemed Larsson was doomed to an eternity in pop’s underclass.
And then came “Midnight Sun” and its parent album of the same name, whose release just over a year ago kicked off one of the most monocultural pop eras in recent memory. Suddenly, a confluence of clear-eyed aesthetic vision, a clutch support placement on Tate McRae’s Miss Possessive Tour, and the best music in her discography thus far propelled the Swedish star straight to the A List.
“I’ve really been doing this for a very long time,” a starry-eyed Larsson shared at a recent show put on by Apple Music and Chase Sapphire which celebrated the era’s sunset with stripped renditions spanning the album and her prior discography. The sentiment gestured just as much toward the fans in attendance as it did the executives who’d bankrolled the event and made her the face of a high-profile brand partnership. It’s the sort of opportunity quintessential to the popstar experience, long derided for its art-as-product ambition but now more openly accepted in our Alix Earle era of “get the bag” culture.
It’s tough to pinpoint how, exactly, her sudden ascent to brand-deal status materialized. The aforementioned mechanisms were all part of it, as was the uber-viral “Stateside” remix. A Tiffany Pollard feature doesn’t hurt; neither does creating art specifically for women and about girlhood, which has proven lucrative time and time again in spite of a male-dominated culture industry that refuses to learn from the Eras Tour or Barbie or the Renaissance Tour or Chappell Roan or, more recently, Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields, or even Lilith Fair for that matter (or, or, or…). She’s also terminally online, with an endlessly-relatable presence across the Internet but especially on TikTok abounding with charm.
Midnight Sun is, to be sure, the best work of her career thus far. But it’s not like she’d been releasing empty fodder all this time: “Lush Life,” fueled by a moment in her show when she brings a fan onstage to do the choreo with her “Scheiße”-style, became the tour’s breakout hit, experiencing chart peaks over ten years after its initial release.
“Zara is an incredible vocalist and an incredible performer, and I think that almost takes priority over the music,” creator Harry Daniels told me after the show. “We’ve entered an age where image is almost more important than the actual music.” He’s been firmly in Larsson’s camp from the jump, infamously on the receiving end of a proxy insult as a result in an oft-memed fight with former Stan Twitter mainstay Ronniesus — “You stan Zara Larsson,” spat with the venom of an aristocrat dismissing a beggar.
Now, stanning Zara Larsson is almost a given, something Daniels attributes largely to the creative finally catching up to Larsson’s considerable talent. It’s true that she’s a top-tier vocalist — the stripped arrangements especially highlighted her titanic voice — but that’s always been the case. But for the first time, her album and particularly her live show feel like the work of a recognizable artist. It’s as if she woke up one day and realized who she was and how to communicate it, an understandable delay given she was thirteen when her career started.
Larsson, too, views the Midnight Sun aesthetic — the beachy blonde and pier-ready airbrushed tees — as an extension of herself. In a preshow Q&A, she addressed this head-on, raising the question that’s quietly loomed over all the fanfare: now that she’s a bona fide popstar, what comes next?
A secret weapon to Midnight Sun’s appeal is Margo XS, the transgender producer who forms one half of electropunk duo deBasement and produced every song on the album, as well as the bulk of Kim Petras’s standout Detour. “There’s no Midnight Sun without Margo,” Larsson shared in the Q&A, accompanied with a hand heart to the booth where Margo DJ’d between onstage moments. As the electronic underground continues to permeate the modern pop landscape — Renaissance and BRAT, of course, as well as more recent releases like Confessions II or Tinashe’s Popstar (both of which boast Arca credits) — it’s perhaps easy to assume Larsson may pursue that direction.
Daniels offered a similar hypothesis before jumping into a wide-ranging brainstorm of the sorts of influences he, arguably her biggest and/or longest fan, could see her excelling under. “I want to see her with crazy rap producers, almost in the way Miley did with Bangerz” — another viable option given that album’s Adéla-fueled resurgence. Maybe it’s time for her C,XOXO, which also served as a decisive artistic manifesto from a previously-chameleonic star. Or, he offers, maybe she should go the roooooock music route and do a shoegaze record.
Basically, there’s no telling what she’ll do. She teased that she’s in the weeds on a new project but offered no additional information, save that she was ideating an arena tour. In today’s fractured music culture, one that’s finally seeing pop shake up the charts after an eternal easy-listening and country stagnation, the next effort serves as Larsson’s chance to firmly decide what kind of pop star she is — a luxury as of yet never afforded her.
She could keep on the avant-garde-inspired electronic track. Or she could go confessional, in the vein of Taylor Swift and her many so-called Taydaughters like Gracie Abrams. There’s also the ultra-vulnerable middle ground, the playground of folks like Audrey Hobert or Lorde’s recent work. Or perhaps the blockbuster hitmaker ethos of someone like Rihanna — a niche notably absent from today’s crop, which Daniels dubbed the “major pop bitch thing.” JT was featured on Larsson’s Girls Trip remix record, so a hip-hop direction isn’t out of the question either.
Larsson is wisely moving on from the Midnight Sun era before its tan turns into a burn, and she seems genuinely energized by the carte blanche ahead of her. “Here’s the thing about Zara,” Daniels offered toward the end of our conversation, grabbing my phone to declare his edict directly into the mic. “Whether it’s good or bad, she’ll always weather the storm. So if it ends up being the biggest flop on the planet, the biggest laughingstock — “oh, she fell off,” “this was supposed to be her ‘Espresso’” — ultimately, I know she’s gonna keep going. And that’s the most admirable quality in a popstar.”
Photography courtesy of Apple Music and Chase Sapphire Reserve
