“No one is powerful like a pop girl,” 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: “To me, the main pop girl [title] 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?” She brandishes her fist and shakes it, a grin creeping across her face. “In my world, no man has that power.”

It’s become increasingly clear that Zara Larsson’s world is one far more inhabitable than the one in which we currently reside. In Larsson’s 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: “BEAUTIFUL! FLY! HOT! and SEXY!”

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’re 10 days out from the announcement of her Grammy nomination for Best Dance Pop Recording for “Midnight Sun,” the titular, earworm-inducing single from her eponymous album, and we’re 17 years out from Larsson’s entry into the public eye as the cherub-faced ten-year-old in a blue dress who won Talang (Sweden’s Got Talent) by belting Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” in a clear, boisterous soprano.

Zara Larsson is one of the most interesting popular musicians today for a number of reasons: largely because she’s well into her second decade on the global stage and she’s not yet 28, and because she’s 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 “Uncover,” which quickly took hold of Scandinavian radio charts and catapulted her to Nordic stardom. In 2015, at the age of 17, she released “Lush Life” and “Never Forget You”—her first international megahits, which spent a combined 26 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. Larsson’s sound, in retrospect, defined the era—2017’s 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.

Larsson’s early collaborators have since peeled out of the mainstream—due to shifting cultural interests, perhaps, or a generational gap. “I never really felt like I had peers. I only had adults and grown ups,” she admits of her early career. “I’ve always felt respected, but it’s just different when you create something with people who actually relate to you, who understand you, who get my, like, references,” she giggles. She’s 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: “It’s supposed to feel easy.”

And by “getting references,” 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 “Symphony,” in a meme that involved the “I just want to be part of your symphony” chorus looping over an image of a Y2K-looking, Lisa Frank-esque joyful dolphin cartoon, gesturing toward a feeling of wholesome, unmitigated joy.

The reception of the image—and the subsequent revival of the song—shepherded a new sort of fanbase into Larsson’s sphere of influence, one demonstrably younger and far more online. She’s 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. “That is my dream,” she says of the newer, teenaged audience dressed in Zara Larsson drag. “To have people being able to step into a universe that we can just be in together.” Zara Larsson’s universe evidently involves “flowers in [the] hair, wearing sparkly colors, [having] the dolphins, key chains, the like.”

It’s 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’s the kind of fanbase that will understand and chuckle at the fact that she tells me, “I do feel like I’m breaking free of the Khia Asylum. I’m scratching on the door. I have been locked up in Khia Asylum.”

For anyone who hasn’t been chained to a phone screen for the past three years, this means Zara Larsson is on the ups. She’s not relegated to the bureaucratic no-man’s 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 “man-hating,” which resulted in vitriolic backlash and death threats), is in on the gag. Actually, she loves the gag.

“I feel like my whole career gets to be alive [now]—it’s a thing that’s living and has lore and story…that’s obviously because of internet culture,” she says. Her only regret, really, is that people may at times take “Symphony” out of context. “It 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,” she sighs.

In the great tradition of Swedish pop music, such paradoxes can be located in a great deal of Larsson’s catalogue, including Midnight Sun tracks “The Ambition,” which reckons with the pressures of competition in the realm, or “Saturn’s Return,” where she laments, “Better let it unfold (cause I’m not young enough) / ’Cause I’m not young enough to know everything anymore.” Larsson, like a long list of predecessors—ABBA and Ace of Base and Avicii and The Cardigans and Roxette (and contemporaries Robyn and Tove Lo and Lykke Li)—know how to drench melancholia in danceability. It’s the Swedish way.

“The Swedish pride is the Max Martin of it all,” 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. “But if you are interested, I think you can [and should research]. You have access to anything, because it’s 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,” she says.

What Larsson brings to the pop genre—has brought to the pop genre since her inception—is a dry and unabashed tendency towards honesty. She’s not raw, per se (“I wouldn’t say [my music] is organic at all. None of the instruments are real instruments—it’s all very digitally produced,” she volunteers when asked about the sonic landscape of her project), but she’s 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’ve seen online, offering her opinion on geopolitical conflicts via Instagram story, shoving her foot and calf into a condom to prove that men shouldn’t claim that they’re too big for one, is the Larsson you’ll meet via Zoom on a Monday evening, hunching in a corner over a phone screen because the charger is too short and she’s had a phone die on Zoom “too many times.”

Shouldn’t we all be so lucky to live in a world in which we’re told the truth, for once? Maybe it wouldn’t 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.

Photographed by Damian Foxe

Styled by Elad Bitton

Written by Annie Bush

Hair: Werner Amort

Makeup: Saba Khan

Digital and Lighting: Finn Waring

Retouch: LoveRetouch

Stylist Assistants: Eden Molen and Gabriella

Location: Sir Prague Hotel

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