Benjamin Ingrosso

Born into the trade

Benjamin Daniele Wahlgren Ingrosso was born in Danderyd, north of Stockholm, on 14 September 1997, into a family that had worked in Swedish entertainment for three generations. His mother is the singer and actress Pernilla Wahlgren; his father, Emilio Ingrosso, was a dancer and later a restaurateur. His maternal grandparents, Hans Wahlgren and Christina Schollin, were both actors. On his father's side he is a cousin of Sebastian Ingrosso of Swedish House Mafia.

He began in public and young. He won Lilla Melodifestivalen in 2006 with "Hej Sofia" and came fourth at MGP Nordic the same year, and the 2007 single "Jag är en astronaut" reached number two in Sweden while he was still nine. Much of his adolescence was spent on stage rather than in studios, in productions including Nils Karlsson Pyssling and Rasmus på luffen. In February 2014 he left musical theatre to concentrate on writing and recording, and later that year won the Swedish edition of Let's Dance with the dancer Sigrid Bernson — a result that matters now mainly for the physical vocabulary it gave him, which is still visible in the way he works a stage.

Melodifestivalen, then Lisbon

His first attempt at Melodifestivalen, in 2017 with "Good Lovin'", finished fifth in the final and reached number ten on the Swedish singles chart. He returned in 2018 with "Dance You Off" and won it, which sent him to the Eurovision Song Contest in Lisbon that May. He placed seventh in the final, having taken maximum points from the juries of eight countries and far less from the public vote — a split that became a running theme in how he was discussed at home.

The debut album Identification arrived on 28 September 2018 and went to number one in Sweden and eighteen in Norway. What followed was a deliberate detour: two Swedish-language records, En gång i tiden released on 15 January 2021 and En gång i tiden (del 2) on 16 April 2021, both of which topped the Swedish chart. Playlist, released on 17 June 2022, reached number four. The same year he was named Artist of the Year at the Grammis and took Kristallen's television personality award, which he won again in 2023.

Pink Velvet Theatre and the 2025 sweep

The record that changed his standing was Pink Velvet Theatre, released through EMI on 25 October 2024. It runs to thirty-eight minutes and went to number one in Sweden and twenty-one in Norway. Its singles had already done the work: "Kite" in January 2024 and "Look Who's Laughing Now" in June both reached number one at home, "All My Life" in August reached three, "Better Days" in April reached seven, and "Honey Boy", made with Purple Disco Machine, reached two. "Back to You" followed in November 2024 and "Angela" in May 2025.

Swedish critics were mostly, if not unanimously, won over: Aftonbladet gave it four out of five and Gaffa five out of six, while Dagens Nyheter and Sydsvenskan both settled on three out of five. The prize season was less equivocal. At the 2025 Grammis he took Artist of the Year, Album of the Year for Pink Velvet Theatre and Song of the Year for "Honey Boy"; at P3 Guld the same year he won Artist of the Year, Album of the Year and Song of the Year for "Kite". He had also performed an interval medley at the Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö in May 2024, in front of the audience that first knew him six years earlier.

Testing the export market

The touring that came with the album was the first real test of whether the records travel. The Better Days Tour in summer 2024 sold out across Sweden to a reported 175,000 people, and a European run followed. In February 2025 he took the Pink Velvet Theatre Tour to North America, opening at House of Blues in Chicago on 7 February and playing Toronto, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Los Angeles — rooms holding a few hundred people rather than a few thousand, a deliberate reset of scale.

Through summer 2025 he worked the European festival circuit instead of headline halls, with appearances at Bergenfest in Bergen on 13 June, Slottsfjell on 4 July and Lollapalooza dates in Berlin and Paris later that month. Then he largely disappeared from view.

A year out of sight, and a record about it

The silence turned out to be the method. In an interview published by Vogue Scandinavia on 16 October 2026 — accompanying what was described as his first photoshoot in two years — Ingrosso said that withdrawing from public visibility was the only way to arrive at a more personal set of lyrics and a different sound, and spoke about working through body dysmorphia and long-standing insecurity about his height.

The same day he announced the album. Titled baby don't say that, I'm sensitive, it runs to thirteen tracks and is due on 19 March 2027 through EMI Nordic. Four songs — "mommy's boy", "nice to meet ya", "deep diver" and "cliché" — were released at once as an EP, joining "funny feeling" and "waste my time", which had already appeared. That is six of thirteen tracks in the open roughly five months before release, an unusually open hand.

The direction is a clean break from the 1970s staging of Pink Velvet Theatre: 1980s new wave and the alternative pop and indie of the late 1990s and early 2000s, built around groove and a playing band rather than arrangement set-pieces. The credits reflect it — Jonathan Rado and Kane Ritchotte producing, with Pino Palladino on bass and Greg Phillinganes on keyboards. Of "mommy's boy", Ingrosso said it concerns "someone who comes across as confident and perhaps a bit vain, but deep down struggles with low self-esteem".

What Happens Next?

The arena tour announced alongside all this is the first of his career at that size. What Happens Next? opens at Löfbergs Arena in Karlstad on 23 October 2026 and runs through Scandinavium in Gothenburg on 24 and 25 October, Veikkaus Arena in Helsinki on 28 October, Malmö Arena on 30 October, Saab Arena in Linköping on 31 October, Oslo Spektrum on 5 November, Göransson Arena in Sandviken on 6 November and Gärdehov in Sundsvall on 7 November, finishing with two nights at the Avicii Arena in Stockholm on 13 and 14 November.

Several of those were added after the original dates sold out when general sale opened on 5 December, following a Mastercard presale from 3 December — the second Gothenburg night and the first Stockholm night are both late additions. These are his first Swedish shows since the summer 2024 run, and the production has been built specifically for indoor arenas rather than scaled up from the outdoor set. Ingrosso's own framing has been consistent and brief: indoors, in big rooms, with room to go further creatively than before.