Zara Larsson

Solna to Talang, and the long middle

Zara Maria Larsson was born on 16 December 1997 in Solna, on the northern edge of Stockholm. She won the 2008 series of Talang, the Swedish version of Got Talent, at the age of ten, singing "My Heart Will Go On". That is an unusually early start even by Scandinavian pop standards, and it came with an unusually long apprenticeship afterwards: four years passed before she signed to the Stockholm independent Ten Music Group in 2012, and another before "Uncover" went to number one in Sweden in 2013.

Her debut album, titled simply 1, followed in 2014 and was a domestic record more than an international one. The pivot came in June 2015 with "Lush Life", released first in Sweden, which went to number one at home, reached number three in the UK and made the top five in 17 countries. It has since been certified diamond in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Mexico, Poland and Sweden, and six-times platinum in the UK for 3.6 million units. What it never did was land properly in the United States, where it stalled at number 75 on the Hot 100 in August 2016 — a detail that matters a great deal to the story of 2026.

The records

So Good, in 2017, is still the album most of her audience arrived through. It carried "Lush Life", "Never Forget You" with MNEK and "Symphony" with Clean Bandit, which went to number one in the UK. Poster Girl arrived in 2021 with "Ruin My Life"; Venus followed in 2024 with "Can't Tame Her", "End of Time" and "On My Love" alongside David Guetta. In between, in 2022, she set up her own label, Sommer House, having come to the end of her decade with Ten Music Group — a structural change as much as a creative one, and one that shapes how her records are credited now.

Midnight Sun, her fifth album, came out on 26 September 2025 through Sommer House and Epic Records. It is short and deliberately so: ten tracks, 31 minutes and 58 seconds, written and produced with MNEK, Margo XS, Zhone and Helena Gao, and pitched somewhere between electropop, dance-pop and drum and bass. The three singles ahead of it were "Pretty Ugly" on 25 April 2025, the title track on 13 June and "Crush" on 15 August. It debuted at number one in Sweden, her fourth album to do so, and eventually reached number 36 on the Billboard 200 after a reissue. Metacritic settled at 89 out of 100.

The title track did what "Lush Life" had not: it reached the top fifteen of the Billboard Hot 100 and earned Larsson her first Grammy nomination, for Best Dance Pop Recording at the 68th Annual Grammy Awards.

A fan on stage in Amsterdam

The second, larger breakthrough was accidental. In November 2025, early in the Midnight Sun Tour, Larsson brought an audience member onstage in Amsterdam to perform the "Lush Life" choreography with her. The clip circulated, other fans began recreating the routine, and a song from 2015 went back up the charts a decade later. It reached number one for the first time in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Norway and Lithuania, matched its original number three peak in the UK in March 2026, entered the Billboard Global 200 at number eight, and climbed to number 35 on the Hot 100 in April 2026 — forty places above where it had finished a decade earlier. A late-April re-release took it to number 22 on Pop Airplay.

Running alongside that was her guest verse on the remix of PinkPantheress's "Stateside", which topped the Billboard Global 200. By the autumn of 2026 she had three separate songs on the Hot 100 — "Lush Life", "Midnight Sun" and "Stateside" — spanning eleven years of catalogue. Bringing a fan up during "Lush Life" has since become a fixed part of the set; at Poland's Open'er Festival on 1 July 2026 it was a man called Peter, who described it afterwards as a dream come true.

Where things stand in September 2026

The most recent release is Midnight Sun: Girls Trip, out on 1 May 2026, her first remix album — 34 minutes of reworked versions of every track from the standard edition, sung across English, Mandarin, Spanish and Swedish, with a guest list that is entirely female: PinkPantheress, Kehlani, JT, Shakira, Tyla, Madison Beer, Robyn, Emilia, Eli, Margo XS, Bambii, Malibu and Helena Gao. Reviews were better than deluxe editions usually get. Pitchfork scored it 7.4 and named the title-track remix Best New Track; NME gave it four and a half stars; Gaffa gave it five. It reached number five in Sweden. The physical CD followed on 4 September 2026.

Billboard named her its 2026 Women in Music breakthrough honoree, which is a fair description of a year in which an artist thirteen years into a recording career was treated as a new arrival by the American market. She has said more unreleased music is in progress, without a date attached.

The show

The Midnight Sun Tour is her fifth and by a wide margin her largest: 106 shows across five continents, opening in Munich on 28 October 2025 and scheduled to finish in Bangkok on 1 November 2026. The European leg was announced on 5 June 2025 as arena-scale, the North American dates on 2 September 2025 with general sale on 5 September, Australia and New Zealand in February 2026 and Asia on 27 May 2026. Three shows have been lost — Paris to the European heatwaves, Queens to severe weather, Abu Dhabi for personal reasons. Immediately before all this she was supporting Tate McRae.

Support has rotated by territory: Omar Rudberg across Europe, Amelia Moore across North America, Eli on selected dates. For the October 2026 Australian and New Zealand run the Sydney duo Cat & Calmell were added on 28 September 2026 to play DJ sets; both Brisbane Riverstage dates and the first Sydney show at the Hordern Pavilion had already sold out, with Live Nation releasing a final allocation for Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Sydney and Auckland on 29 September at 3pm local time.

The staging is unapologetically 2016 — pastel, glitter, midriffs, inflatable sea creatures — which is either a coincidence or the point, given which of her songs went viral. Reviewing the Riviera Theatre show in Chicago on 15 March 2026 for the Chicago Sun-Times, Selena Fragassi counted 25 songs in roughly 90 minutes and singled out her vocal on "Saturn's Return", where Larsson told the room she had wanted to do this her whole life; the verdict was that she had proved herself a strong contender in the current pop field. At Lollapalooza on 31 July, after a rain delay of nearly two hours, Matt Moore described the set as a victory lap, with a four-piece band, a hot pink sports car wheeled out for "Hot and Sexy", and Larsson telling Grant Park it was the biggest crowd she had played to.