With a Grammy nomination for Best Pop/Dance Recording, pop princess Zara Larsson is glowing in the heat of Midnight Sun, her fifth studio album, and the one that finally puts her right where she belongs: at the centre of her own creative universe.

A bare-faced, radiant Zara Larsson joins our call, her head tucked into a turquoise-blue hoodie from her own merch line. She’s bright, funny, and speaking from her Berlin dressing room ahead of her Midnight Sun world tour. At last, she’s found the rhythm she’s been craving, a pause after months of press runs and a North American tour with Tate McRae.

“This past month has been very stressful,” she exhales. “Probably the most intense month I’ve ever had.” For someone pulling nearly 30 million global listeners each month, that checks out. “We’ve just been working as hard as we can.”

The results speak for themselves. The single Midnight Sun has already racked up over 50 million streams, with almost four million on its debut day. But Zara isn’t one to chase numbers. “Number-wise, Midnight Sun isn’t doing as well on streaming,” she admits, “but it’s doing so much better in other ways – the people coming to my shows, the artists I respect saying they love the new sound. That means more to me. It just feels better.”

Scroll through #ZaraLarsson on any platform and you’ll get the full picture: butterfly-filled, bootylicious, and bountifully glam. This is Zara in her element, playful, confident, authentic. “I spend a lot of time on TikTok and Instagram,” she laughs. “TikTok is my number one. It’s too fun. I’m naturally very interested in the comments of things.” The irony, of course, is that she doesn’t care much about what people say about her. That’s the balance she’s mastered: engaged, but unfazed. So when she made an album about basking in her own light, it was bound to be only half-serious, and entirely self-assured.

At 27, Zara is gliding through her Saturn return – the astrological turning point that shakes up your late-20s, providing a fuller, deeper understanding of adulthood – with a mix of calm, humour, and sparkle. She’s been in the spotlight for nearly two decades, from winning Sweden’s Taalang at 10 with Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” to signing her first record deal at 14. Since then, she’s become the voice of a generation, soundtracking the 2010s with hits like “Never Forget You” with MNEK, “Lush Life,” “Symphony” with Clean Bandit, and “I Would Like.”

Her new album is a remix of everything she’s learned: electronic, punky, funky, pop-forward, layered with bouncy bass, glittering synths, and sexy melodies. “I’ve always listened to a lot of different music,” she says, “but I just love something you can dance to.”

The record took shape in motion, from week-long writing trips to Brazil and Jamaica, where she penned the shimmering “Blue Moon.” “Being out in nature really inspired me,” she says. ““Blue Moon” came from that. We saw this gorgeous, enormous moon in Jamaica, the craziest moon I’ve ever seen. And Midnight Sun is inspired by Swedish summers. I just wanted to be more experimental with what it sounds like, and not to think, ‘Will radio play this?’ Actually, I didn’t give a fuck.”

That defiant ease, doing things her own way, feels hard-won. A lifelong member of the Beyhive, Zara lights up when Beyoncé’s name comes up. “Growing up, I was always obsessed with women who had big voices,” she says, eyes wide. “Beyoncé, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Christina Aguilera, people who could really sing. Beyonce really opened the doors for me when it came to performing – you can sing and do that? That’s incredible. But I’ve always been very into the singing part of it. She’s proof that you can be both – I want to be both. I want to give energy. I want to give a full performance. I want to give a show. But I also love to sing – that’s my number one love. Singing and performing go hand in hand for me, but [it’s] singing first.”

The singing, and more recently, putting pen to paper.  “I’ve never really had a rule of ‘I need to write all my music myself’ because, like, I didn’t write “Lush Life”. I love that song, though. If I hear a good song that someone wrote for me, I love that,” she says. “But now, I also like to write, and I’m pretty good at it. I realised as an artist, if it doesn’t come from me, if I’m not the one who’s planting the seed, then what’s the point?” she admits. 

So on this album, that’s what she did, alongside a trusted group of collaborators.“I couldn’t have created this album if it weren’t for the people I made it with,” she says, citing MNEK (“Uzo” to Zara), Margot XS (songwriter/producer wiz), and Helena Gao (super songwriter). “It made me feel like I was pulling up to the studio, hanging out with friends, and then magically, a song appeared. It was really like that. They all put their personalities and sounds into the room, and what happened when we were together was just the highest vibrations and magic. It was really beautiful. Also, the older I get now, because I’m 27, I’m not the youngest person in the room a lot of the time anymore, but just being surrounded by people who are cut from the same cloth, the same age, we had kind of similar experiences, or we have the same vibe, the same friend, which just made everything so much more fun.”

She pauses, then smiles, that mix of confidence and ease that defines her new era. “I want to be in every meeting, every room,” she says. “When I was younger, people didn’t think I needed to be involved in those things. But now I know I do. I want to be part of everything.”

That clarity twinkles through “Saturn Return,” the album’s penultimate track, where she sings, ‘It feels so good to know I don’t know what I’m doing / I love that I’m free in my naivety, I won’t lose it.’ “That one’s special,” she says. “We wrote it at the very end, when the album was basically finished. It’s exactly how I feel right now being 27, and loving that [I don’t have to have all the answers.]”

It’s a truth that glows across the whole record. Zara didn’t need Midnight Sun to prove anything, but through it, she’s found a new ease, a new centre. Now, she says it simply: “I just want to focus on living my life in the most amazing way possible.”

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Photography by Axle Jozeph
Styling by Sir Wilow
Words by Aswan Magumbe
Hair by Miwa Moroki at TAG Agency
Make-up by Lorandy
Photography Assistant Emma Vadon
Fashion Assistants Guilherme Cevidanes Elijah Verrier
Production Assistant Lea Hakamaki
Videography by Nicolas Pereria