Zara Larsson grew up wanting to be like Britney Spears. “I was like, ‘I want to be a superstar – I can’t wait for the paparazzi to follow me,’” says the Swedish pop singer. “And now … I don’t know.”
It’s not that Larsson’s dreams are smaller now than they were when she was six years old and performing for her family. Or when she was 10 and won Sweden’s biggest TV talent show. Or when she was 14 and signed her first record deal. “I want to be number one, I want to be the first, I want to be the biggest and the best at everything I do,” she says, at 23. She hopes her new album, Girl poster, does even better than its zippy predecessor and sold in platinum So good (2017). She hopes that her singles will exceed the billion streams of “Lush Life” of 2015. She does not know if she wants to be famous at the level of Britney.
“[When I was younger], I just saw what was in the magazines, ”says Larsson, just after watching the new documentary Coaching Britney Spears. “And like, ‘Oh my God, Britney went crazy and shaved her head,’ and everybody was laughing about it. But it’s not really funny. She has been the laughing stock for so many years. Now imagine if you were sitting in a TV interview and people were commenting on your addiction and laughing at it. Or like, ‘Hey, you know what everyone’s talking about? Your breasts. ”
Larsson speaks to me from a studio in Stockholm, between rehearsals for a live broadcast of International Women’s Day (naturally, she will be performing at an Ikea that day). Dressed in a tie-dye hoodie, hair scraped into a ponytail, she is airy and gregarious, never biting her words, which tend to come out with more of an American tune than a Swedish one. “I hope that we collectively wake up and treat people a little more kindly,” she continues, “or that we hold people accountable.” She thinks the #MeToo movement is to be thanked for this. “He just knocked it over. People were saying, “In fact, enough”. I feel like people are having different conversations now. And there are a lot more women, at least where I work, sitting at the big tables.
That’s a welcome change, given how often Larsson has had to “give birth” to older male executives. “Having to call them a lot to tell them they’re doing a great job or they’ll be really sulky and angry,” she said, rolling her eyes. “And also when things don’t go as planned, they can leave a meeting. And people are like, “He’s so passionate!” When in reality it’s just like, “What the fuck was that?”
Larsson may still be young, but she’s been in the industry long enough to witness its ugly sides. After winning the TV show Talang in 2008 – she sang Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” in the finale – pre-teen Larson set her sights on a recording deal. It wasn’t easy, but she landed one in 2012 and her debut album 1 made her a true popstar in her home country. It was the single “Lush Life” that caught the rest of the world. A dancehall anthem written by a crack team of Swedish songwriters (Larsson doesn’t care that she subcontracts half of the songs she releases), it was the sonic equivalent of a cocktail by the pool; for an entire summer those elastic, sweet synths were on every radio station and in every supermarket. More explosive pop songs followed, including the Clean Bandit collaboration “Symphony” – an enhanced vocal gymnastics exercise on the violin – and the clubby EDM banger “Never Forget You”. All three were featured on her album, which did big business – although Larsson quit before becoming a megastar.
The music industry was not an easy world to navigate. She found herself getting annoyed at meetings. “Imagine being here, super young, and all these older guys, producers, writers, executives, they’ve been in the industry a lot longer than me,” she explains. “Why would I think my opinion is better? Why would I think I know what’s right when these guys have clearly been around much longer than I have? It’s easy to be in that position and think, ‘Oh, but they know better than I do.’ “
As Larsson got older she became more assertive – but then a new problem arose. The older men she worked with started making sexual advances. “A very good majority of them wait until the day a girl turns 18,” she says. “Oh my gosh that change, the change in tone people had the day I turned 18… it was actually wild.” Suddenly people much older than me, whom I had admired and who were framing me, were suddenly making comments about my body, like, “What hotel are you staying in?” What room are you staying in? And I was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ “
It was pre- # MeToo, she said. As willful as she was at the time, she didn’t know how to react. “It was difficult because I found myself in situations where I just choked myself,” she says. “I am a very strong feminist. I’m not moving. If someone tried to make a move I would hit them, you know what I mean? And then you sit there and feel a fucking old man touch your thigh and you freeze. And the woman I thought I was then was just gone. And that scared me so much. And then you feel guilty because you didn’t say anything, or you didn’t make it clear enough that it was very inappropriate.
It hasn’t happened once. This has happened several times. “There are a lot of incidents that are pretty minor, but the intentions were clear, if you know what I mean,” Larsson says. “And I just didn’t know what to do. Because in general this person has a lot of power and he knows it. “Oh, what are you going to do about it?” You know? The older I get, the more I say to myself: “What are you doing? But a lot of times I was just in shock, so I froze.
We move on to happier topics: Girl poster. It’s now been four years since Larsson’s last album, and in the pop world, it might as well be a lifetime. Little Mix released two records during this time; Ariana Grande three; Taylor Swift four. Larsson is well aware of this. “That momentum isn’t there,” she said with a shrug. “I am not Rihanna. People aren’t going to wait like that in the pop world. The world of pop is changing rapidly. So I sort of start over. I’m like, ‘Hey guys, what’s up? I’m alive. Did her label put pressure on her to keep that momentum going? “Yeah, but I lost it,” she said with a shrug. “So that was good.”
She could have continued to do Girl poster for another 10 years, “but at some point it’s like, ‘I just wanna take it out,'” she says. It’s now. And while she doesn’t stray too far from the sound that made her famous, punch-the-air pop looks good on her. She wrote the album with Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter (who wrote for everyone from Gwen Stefani to Lady Gaga), and I would put money into at least one of her songs with a soundtrack. Love island before the end of the year.
Maybe it’ll be the flirty and staccato “FFF,” a song about falling in love with a friend; that’s what happened with her now boyfriend, dancer Lamin Holmen. “Usually I’m a fucking type girl on the first date,” she says, “and then we’ll get to know each other. This time it was the opposite. I had known him for years. We had a lot of friends in common. And then all of a sudden it’s like, ‘S ***, am I crazy or is there some chemistry between us?’ “It worked. “I think anyone who has feelings for their friends should go,” she said.
The object of affection on “Ruin My Life”, meanwhile, seems like bad news: “I want you to ruin my life,” she pleads over and over, at a murky pace. “I want you to screw up my nights.” It’s the oldest track on the album – it’s been released since 2018 – and it has racked up 500 million streams. Larsson knows it’s “not very stimulating” – but it doesn’t all have to be. “He’s got a positive aura – it’s pretty without excuse,” she said, “it’s like, ‘Ruin my fucking life then.’ I’m not ashamed of feeling weak, or like I’m struggling, because everyone else is. And if you act like you don’t, then you’re lying. And I think there is a relativity in the fact that people appreciate.
In the age of social media, even the biggest pop stars on the planet should show us the grubby details of their lives. Does relatability come at the expense of mysticism? “People these days don’t listen to your music because they feel like an unapproachable superstar, they do because they feel like they’re almost supporting a friend,” Larsson says. “But Beyonce, who’s my biggest idol, I don’t want her to be a real person. It’s strange. I want to keep her on this pedestal and I want to keep her “godified” – to make her taller than a person, because she has influenced my life so much that she almost looks like this mythical creature. And by being so accessible, it takes away the huge fame that people once had, where the only time they could literally see them was if they literally went to their concerts.
Yet last year the internet was the only way for Larsson fans to gain access to her. The concerts were out of the question. “It was really bad, honestly,” Larsson says. “Seeing numbers, views and tastes is not the same as seeing real people at shows or festivals. I’m like, “Is this what I want to do?” Because I haven’t done what I love for a long time.
She finally decided that yes, that was what she wanted to do. “My boyfriend reminded me, ‘It’s part of who you are, and you’ve been doing this long before anyone knew about you.’ It’s like a form of therapy for me, and no one can take it away from me.
But why stop at the music? “I hate that life is so short and I want to do a million different things,” she says. “I want to be a teacher, I want to be a pilot, I want to be a doctor and a lawyer and I want to be a director, and I want to make films and be an actor. But I’m really bad at doing things just for fun. If I paint I can’t just paint, I need the best paint. If I’m going to ride, I’m like, ‘OK, so I’m going to be on the national team in a year. I have to earn the gold. “She laughs. “It’s just who I am, I guess.