BY JOHN RUSSELL
PHOTOGRAPHER BAILEY REBECCA ROBERTS
PHOTO ASSISTANTS KAITLIN TUCKER AND EMILE ASKEY
STYLIST RYAN YOUNG
FASHION ASSISTANT LJ PEREZ
HAIR SIRSA
MAKEUP COLBY SMITH
MANICURE NORI
Zara Larsson is—shall we say—fully embracing the freedom and frivolity of the post-pandemic lifestyle. “Yeah, I went out last night and I was not prepared for that,” she says over Zoom from London. “It was just a regular Tuesday! Like, I don’t go out on Tuesdays! But one thing led to another and…” dinner with friends at LPM turned into drinks at Annabel’s and more. “It was worth it, ’cause I had a great night,” she says confidently—if a little hung over.
Luckily, at 23 years old, Larsson is at an age when you bounce back quickly. When she parties hard, she works even harder. Hitting the studio the very next morning, “I wrote a really good song with one of my favorite people,” she reveals.
Really, that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Larsson’s work ethic is awe-inspiring. Since releasing her debut EP, Introducing, in 2013, not a year has gone by in which she didn’t put out new music. We’re not just talking a one-off single here or a guest vocal there; we’re talking multiple songs, many of which have charted internationally, each year since she was 15. Her 2014 debut album, 1, went platinum in her native Sweden. Three years later and already a household name in Scandinavia, she made a play for international stardom with her second album, So Good. Its first three singles—“Lush Life,” “Never Forget You,” and “Ain’t My Fault”—all reached No. 1 on the Swedish charts, and the album was certified platinum in the U.S. Time included her on its list of the “30 Most Influential Teens of 2016” alongside Simone Biles, Shawn Mendes, and Malala Yousafzai. Back-to-back world tours in support of So Good followed, and all the while Larsson continued to churn out new singles, many of which would ultimately end up on her second international release, 2021’s Poster Girl.
From a very early age, Larsson knew she wanted to be a singer—and she wasn’t going to wait to do it. At just 10 years old, she appeared on Talang, Sweden’s version of America’s Got Talent. It was the only musical competition show that accepted kids, she says. “I wanted to be on Idol and X Factor, but you had to be, like, 16. And I was like, I’m not f***ing waiting until I’m 16! I wanna sing now! I want people to see me now!” She ended up winning the competition with her rendition of Céline Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.”
But while her version of the song became a top-10 single in Sweden, fame didn’t immediately follow. It would be five years before she signed a record deal with Swedish label TEN Music Group. In the meantime, she studied ballet at the Royal Swedish Ballet School, discovering—fairly quickly—that she didn’t want to be a ballerina. “I stayed in school for two more years knowing I didn’t want to dance, because I loved my classmates,” she says. “We were just like sisters, honestly.”
That tight-knit, supportive community of young women instilled in Larsson a nascent feminism—though she wouldn’t have called it that at the time—which later blossomed when she switched to a more diverse, co-ed school and witnessed the casual misogyny displayed by her male classmates.
“It was like, Oh, this is what the real world looks like,” she remembers. She began posting about feminism on her personal blog and has been outspoken about her views ever since.
In the meantime, her career was blossoming with increased crossover into America. In October 2019, Larsson wrapped the third leg of her “Don’t Worry Bout Me Tour” in Atlanta, intending to head back out on the road the following summer. We all know what happened next: The pandemic hit. The summer 2020 tour was canceled, and while life didn’t exactly grind to a halt for Larsson—she released three singles last year and continued to write and record remotely from the home she shares with her sister in Stockholm—things did get a little dark.
“Honestly, I felt a bit lost in the sauce during the whole corona year,” she admits. “I wasn’t performing live, I didn’t really have sessions, and I was like, Do I even like music? What do I want in this? I was really lost, and I just felt like, Maybe I don’t wanna do music. Maybe I actually don’t really think it’s fun. I was just asking myself all these questions.”
Larsson, like so many of us, thinks she might have been just a teensy bit depressed from the lack of social stimulation. That all changed this spring. For starters, she finally released Poster Girl, the long-awaited follow-up to So Good. But what really shook her out of her funk was performing again. Larsson teamed up with Ikea for a live special that streamed on International Women’s Day, and in April she sang with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra for a live radio broadcast. “I was onstage singing with them. I was like, Nah, I love music,” she recalls. “I love to sing. That’s really what it comes down to. I love to sing so much.”
Having lived through the long winter of our social disconnect, Larsson is throwing herself into the roaring ’20s as the world reopens. In May, she re-released Poster Girl as an expanded “Summer Edition,” with two previously unreleased tracks, an acoustic version of “I Need Love” featuring Swedish folk duo First Aid Kit, a remix of “Right Here,” and recordings of “Ruin My Life” and “Never Forget You” from her performance with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Still, a touch of the bittersweet remnants of COVID linger. Ordinarily, summer for Larsson would mean playing festivals all over Europe—a part of pre-COVID life that has still not returned. “I think I’ll just do shows in the UK, honestly,” she says with a sigh. “Maybe one in Norway? But it’s very few. It’s not a festival summer.”
Instead, Larsson already has a Scandinavian arena tour scheduled for November and in the meantime, she’s busy writing and recording material for her next album. To confirm for fans: You won’t have to wait another four years, for music, as you did between So Good and Poster Girl.
What to expect? Larsson has said in the past that she wants to move with the currents of pop music, but right now, at the very beginning of the writing process, she’s feeling a little experimental. “I’m kinda down for anything,” she reveals.
So far, that’s leaning toward a classical vibe. Still inspired by her performance with the symphony, Larsson is very into strings and horns right now and says she wants to add a cinematic quality to her new work.
“I say to my friends and producers and writers, I’m like, ‘Let’s imagine we’re going to Mars. How are we feeling? How are we feeling when we walk to the rocket?’ And it’s, like, pretty dramatic,” she says. Especially post-pandemic, “I want a little drama. I also wanna be able to dance. I want to go to space and leave mankind behind. And it’s quite sad, because you can’t come back, but you’re also quite hopeful because you’re starting a new chapter for humanity. It’s, like, very deep. Also, when we go into space and you’ve left all your friends and family behind, yeah, you’re hopeful, but you’re also going to a place where Drake is at, and he’s gonna have a dance party at this new planet. So that’s the vibe.”
Still with us? By her own admission, Larsson isn’t always great at articulating “the music part.”
“Like, producing,” she clarifies. “I’m a really good topliner, I can write words and write melodies. But when it comes to the production all I can say is, ‘I don’t like that. I don’t know what it is, but it’s something I don’t like. Let’s try something new.’ That’s it.” (Hence, the extended space travel metaphor.)
Still, she’s eager to learn. During quarantine, Larsson bought a whole in-home studio setup—and then kind of neglected it. “It’s just sitting there and it’s staring at me and I feel ashamed every time I walk by it, because I feel like, Oh, man, I should know how to do this and I don’t!” she says. “It’s hard. You gotta be nerdy about it. You gotta sit there for hours and hours and hours. I’m really bad at letting myself develop, and that’s what you have to do when you work on things like production. No one’s good when you first start out. But I like things that I am immediately good at!”
One thing Larsson is unquestionably good at? Entertaining. It’s not just what she does; it’s who she is. “I think deep down, I’m kind of a people pleaser and I want people to have a good time,” she admits. On some level, that’s what pop stardom is all about: the sold-out worldwide stadium tour, thousands of fans singing along, radio ubiquity. Larsson wants it all, and it’s already happening.
“It’s kinda wild, you know, when you watch videos of people’s weddings and they play one of my songs,” she says. “Or it’s their graduation party. You’re part of people’s lives, even if you don’t know them. And that’s kinda beautiful.”
