Zara Larsson Gets Her Flowers
“Midnight Sun” is more adult, more sexed, and more camp than Larsson’s past music, which tended toward the subgenre known as tropical house—E.D.M. mixed with floaty, naïve Caribbean rhythms. I wondered if opening with the album’s biggest song might drain the energy from the rest of the set. But the crowd, Larsson knew, was on her side; she did not have to persuade them to do a call-and-response to “Never Forget You,” or to “Pretty Ugly,” a stomp anthem with the lyric “Have you ever seen a pretty girl get ugly like this?” The audience, awash in plastic hibiscus flowers and rhinestones, was there to revel in the late-bloomer triumph of “Midnight Sun”: the seasoned performer finally anointed as an idol. Made primarily with the British producer MNEK, Larsson’s longtime collaborator, the record homes in on the idiosyncrasies of dance music, tapping regional manners like the Balkan accordion on “Euro Summer,” Baltimore club bass on “Blue Moon,” and Rio funk on “Hot & Sexy.” When it came out last fall, it seemed to signal that Larsson’s music had gained an expanded consciousness; she joked that it broke her out of the “Khia asylum,” what the extremely online call the imaginary holding cell for middling female artists. I personally find the main-girl-hierarchy talk resurging in pop circles a little tired, but Larsson evidently does not. On “Saturn’s Return,” from “Midnight Sun,” she contemplates her ambition in the scheming mode of a rapper:
At the age of ten, Larsson won “Talang,” Sweden’s version of “America’s Got Talent.” Technically, her first single was a cover of “My Heart Will Go On,” by Céline Dion, which was her star-making moment on the show. The appeal of Larsson lies less in her songcraft than in her got-it-out-the-mud performer’s grit. She is a transitional artist, straddling the old model of gruelling, radio-chasing artist development—she signed with Epic at fifteen, and recently founded her own label—and the newer terrain of spontaneous TikTok propulsion. Among her peers, Larsson is a traditionalist for her straightforward and sincere approach to live performance. A presence like Charli XCX—sunglasses on, back to the crowd—sometimes reaches transcendence through an eroticized distance. Dua Lipa’s glamour-bot routine is a bit slack, Fosse by way of a Jane Fonda aerobics tape. Even Sabrina Carpenter, whose hyper-femme aesthetic is closest to Larsson’s, presents her act from a place of irony. Larsson is zealous. The leg stays flexed. She wants it bad and so we want it for her. Her stage banter, delivered in her delectable Euro twang, expressed this: “It really does mean so much to me that I get to live my dream and walk onstage each night and sing my songs and live my passion.”
In that same interlude, Larsson described the strangeness of being well established internationally and newly beloved in the States: “I’ve been doing this for such a long time, but I feel like it’s the beginning.” Her early albums “So Good” and “Poster Girl” were bouncy bubblegum fare, knowingly indebted to Swedish pop, yet the turgid consistency of their sound gave the impression of a promising artist who was constantly débuting. Why hadn’t any of her producers and writers over the years—a murderers’ row including Tove Lo, Julia Michaels, and the duo Monsters & Strangerz, of the Max Martin school—struck the vein of her personality? You can occasionally hear, in Larsson’s pre-“Midnight Sun” discography, her sense of wit and individual weirdness. I think that the sneaking melancholy of “All the Time,” from 2019, is made of the same stuff that makes Charlie Puth’s retro piano-man routine work, and I like the sample and flip of the Jamaican artist Sasha’s dancehall hit “Dat Sexy Body”—itself a feminizing of Tony (CD) Kelly’s “Bookshelf” riddim—on Larsson’s “I Would Like.” These songs evince the mix of pop virtuosity and indie sleaze that would eventually make Larsson a cult artist, part of the lineage of straight white girls who are embraced as guardian angels for the gay club scene. On a new remix of PinkPantheress’s “Stateside,” a pulsing garage track about pursuing American dreams, Larsson hits a flow state of asyncopation singing about a Swedish boy that she’s left behind: “ ’Cause I fly Stockholm to L.A. / In my feelings on the plane / Worries fade away / When I hit the stage.”
