Zara Larsson’s icon era: “Why would I ever doubt myself? Like, I’m amazing”

On a well-worn leather couch near the so-called VIP lane at a bowling alley in Stockholm, Zara Larsson is taking a nap. In the adjacent hall, a league of seniors wearing snazzy silk bowling shirts are throwing strikes (when Larsson made her entrance earlier, a bowler asked her for a photo, exclaiming that her granddaughter is a fan). With the clattering of pins and animated chatter, it is hardly a peaceful setting, yet there Larsson lays, looking like a modern Disney princess in a neon pink lace Rotate suit and full makeup, her blonde hair coifed just so.

“She can sleep anywhere,” her manager tells me, airplanes inclusive. Not a bad skill for an international pop star. Moments later she’s awoken and called to set, where, in a nod to a viral TikTok in which the singer professed her hatred for bowling, we have asked her to bowl. She narrowly misses a strike (the seniors gave her some pointers). Between takes, she absentmindedly sings along (pitch perfectly) to Beyoncé’s ‘Dangerously in Love’.

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“I don’t know if I’m going through some psychosis of me thinking I’m the best in the world, because that’s how I feel,” Larsson tells me a few hours later. “Why would I ever doubt myself? Like, I’m amazing.” We’re sitting at hip Japan-inspired eatery Misshumasshu (Larsson’s suggestion) eating rice bowls topped with tonkatsu. Face and hair still done from our video shoot, Larsson, who keeps an apartment in Stockholm but spends most of her time in LA, appears the perfect mashup of Sweden and California in a tiedye rugby shirt and vibrant velvet trousers from Acne Studios, Uggs on her feet.

It’s been a while since Larsson, 25, felt this sort of radical self-assuredness. In fact, she hasn’t felt this way since she was a teenager. It’s rarer still, given that when we meet, her new single ‘Can’t Tame Her’ is releasing in a couple of days. “I’m actually so chill,” she says, when I ask her if releasing new music makes her feel some kind of way. “Usually I’m anxious. I’m freaking out. I call my manager three times a day and I say, ‘This was a mistake. I hate the song, I hate the video, I hate my face, I hate my clothes. Scrap it, scrap the whole thing. Let’s start over’.” It isn’t the music itself that she’s unsure of, but the impending reaction. “What I’m really anxious about is people’s opinions about it. Really, I’m super happy with what I do,” she says. “I don’t feel happy about the good things [people say] – I feel relieved. And then I’m looking for the bad things to confirm my insecurities.”

Still, she reads everything, even, most dangerously, her Twitter mentions. “Especially when I’m in my deep, dark moments, and I’m getting my period – I get really, really bad PMS,” she says. “And then it’s almost like a self-harming thing.” She finds herself seeking out the bad comments which, when you have 7.9 million followers on Instagram, are inevitable. This year, however, is different. No anxiety spirals in 2023. She’s actually looking forward to releasing a few singles and, later this year, an entire album.

There’s one place where Larsson’s self-doubt has never been able to catch her: on stage. Larsson, who grew up in Solna, first stepped in front of an audience at eight years old for a Christmas-themed talent show at a small outdoor shopping centre in the Stockholm suburb of Nynäshamn. “It’s the middle of the winter, so it’s freezing,” she says, adding that the stage itself was one of those mechanical scissor lift aerial platforms they use to grab things off high shelves in warehouses.

She earned a spot in the finals, which just so happened to take place aboard the infamous Viking Line: a massive cruise ship that travels between Stockholm and Helsinki. I point out that she was probably performing for an audience that was quite inebriated. “Oh yeah, definitely,” she says. “One hundred per cent.” Shortly thereafter she appeared on a more significant stage; at 10 years old she won Talang, Sweden’s iteration of Got Talent, with a shiver-inducing cover of Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’.

Since then, Larsson has known, with absolute certainty, that she would be a successful artist, but that didn’t stop others from questioning her. Recently, she stumbled across an old interview in which a reporter asked her, then 15, what her “Plan B” was. “I’m like, ‘Why are you asking a 15-year-old what their Plan B is?’,” she says. “Would you ask somebody who works at ICA or a babysitter? I’m just 15.” Her only plan back then was to perform. “I never had a Plan B. That was the answer, and that’s still the answer.” In 2014, her debut album, 1, made her a star in Scandinavia, but it was ‘Lush Life’, an infectious, dreamy pop anthem with song-of-summer energy, and its subsequent album, So Good, released in 2017, that anointed her an international pop sensation. The track, which for a time was inescapable, was certified platinum in 16 countries.

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What is the Zara Larsson sound? Even she isn’t entirely sure. “I don’t have a definite type of music – I don’t have a definite style that I go for,” she says. She oscillates from pure pop bops to groovier R&B-infused tracks. Sometimes it’s a bit more electronic, sometimes she relies more on her backing band, with whom she’s performed for eight years (though they won’t be joining her upcoming performances, she reveals). It’s a lot of, as she puts it, “crying on the dance floor”, a genre that was seemingly invented in Sweden by ABBA and later crystallised by Robyn.

Aesthetically she’s varied as well, at one moment emphasising comfort (a preference she attributes to her leotard and tracksuit days at the Royal Swedish Ballet School) and the next giving showgirl. “Fashion can be so expressive of who you are,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like I’m so expressive, I don’t need it.” What is clear, however, is that Larsson is a pop star, full stop. Arguably Sweden’s first international pop star – we’re talking pure pop star, no indie leanings allowed – since Robyn.

If one were to conjure the image of the quintessential Swedish pop star, she would probably look a lot like Zara Larsson. That is to say that Larsson possesses a sort of Nordic beauty – the delicate features, the porcelain skin and the blonde hair – that fulfils a certain prototypical view of the Scandinavian woman (sufficient to say it is a stereotype that is easily debunked on a brisk walk around Stockholm, where Larsson is proudly from). But when you factor in her singular star power (not to mention her unusually unfiltered nature – more on that later), there’s nothing stereotypical about her. This becomes instantly obvious when she steps on the stage.

Performing is where Larsson thrives. “When I go on stage and there’s a lot of people and everyone’s like, ‘Wow’,” she says, mimicking a cheering fan. “I’m like, yeah? So?” She shrugs as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. Almost nothing fazes Larsson, not thousands of screaming fans, not platinum tracks. “If I did get a number one, I would just be like, ‘Oh yeah, finally’,” she says, laughing. “I think I am very entitled to success.”

At the same time that Larsson was gaining worldwide recognition for her music (and the followers to match), she was cultivating a certain infamy for her “provocative posts”. These days it doesn’t seem especially radical for a woman in the public eye to make feminist statements on Instagram, but in 2015, being an outspoken feminist who is also a mainstream celebrity was headline-generating. Add to the equation that Larsson, who possesses an innate cheekiness, speaks internet with extraordinary fluency and you have the sort of virality that is met with a mixed (to put it lightly) response.

Take, for instance, the condom post. “Years ago, I put a condom on my leg,” Larsson says, refer- ring to an Instagram post in 2015 that, as described, depicted her leg wearing a condom to illustrate that a rubber can easily fit even the most well-endowed man. “People were like, ‘Oh my god, that is crazy!’ I remember having to speak about that condom in every single interview that I went to for the next two years” (Let it be known that this interviewer did not bring up condom-gate). Things got gross when male radio shows started asking Larsson, then 16, to demonstrate by putting condoms on various phallic objects. The irony is she didn’t even come up with the gag – she saw it on Tumblr (though she does point out, proudly, that her condom stretched all the way up to her knee).

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“I wasn’t really trying to make a huge statement,” Larsson continues. “It was just a funny way of conveying a message.” Some people didn’t find it funny. And those same people really didn’t find it funny when she professed to “hate men” (which she doesn’t, by the way. Not all men, anyway). As Larsson quickly learned, it’s tricky to have a nuanced or productive conversation with detractors on the internet. “I was so heavily criticised by a lot of people,” she says. At first, she dismissed the people who were going “really hard” on her as “really stupid”. But in the long run, it started to affect her. “If you get really negative stuff about yourself – really mean stuff – you might laugh at it in the moment and think, ‘Haha you’re crazy’, but it still lives in your head.”

Eventually, she quit Twitter altogether. “I just started to think it wasn’t that fun to be myself online and put myself out there,” she says. “Now, I feel the same way about not giving a f***, but I’m a bit more mature and considerate about myself and the people around me.” While she may be cavalier about sharing her opinions, she does have the self-awareness to admit she cares a great deal about how they’re received. “I still have that craving of wanting to be loved and liked,” she says. “I think that’s why I’m an artist.” Today she’s back on Twitter, albeit less controversially. In general, however, she isn’t one to hold back from saying what’s on her mind. “I’m quite filterless,” she says. “If you categorise people as mysterious or relatable, I would definitely not be mysterious. I share too much.”

In her chaotic social media era, Larsson had a tendency to overshare the specifics of her relationships. These days, however, her boyfriend Lamin Holmén, a dancer whom she’s dated for three years, only appears in the odd wholesome post (wholesome by Larsson standards – you still might find Holmén in a bathtub with her feet in his face). “I do believe that if it’s good, you don’t have to make sure that people know it’s good,” she says. “Maybe I shared about my other relationships before because I wasn’t that satisfied. My theory is if you post a lot about your relationship, it’s not that good.”

Larsson is a self-professed girlfriend girl. “I always had boyfriends, there’s always someone” she says. “I don’t get the whole, like, ‘Oh, you have to be single to find yourself’.” She even chose her high school based on her boyfriend at the time. “It wasn’t a bad school,” she assures me. She attended IRL for one year, remotely for two and then dropped out just three courses shy of graduation. “I’m so close to the finish line, I just have no motivation,” she says. “What am I going to use it for?”

She is, however, studying something else entirely: helicopter flying. “First I wanted to do airplanes,” she said. “And then I thought, no, helicopter is harder. Let me do that.” Currently in her seventh lesson, Larsson is enjoying working towards a specific, tangible goal. Unlike an album, which can be subjectively received as good or bad, a helicopter licence is irrefutable. Plus, earning her certificate will prove that despite not graduating high school, she does have the discipline to finish something. “You do have to study,” she says. “It’s not only the fun flying part.”

Internet haters aside, if Larsson’s ascent seems too good – too lush – to be true, it’s because it sort of is. “In life, I feel like I’ve just been really lucky,” she says. “I’m like, ‘When is it going to go bad’.” Any struggle she’s faced has been internal. She felt “so much pressure” following the success of Too Good that it took her four years to release a follow up. And while Poster Girl wasn’t met with the same commercial success as its predecessor, it was still celebrated critically (and debuted at number three on the Swedish Albums Chart). “Maybe people are thinking, ‘Oh she’s a loser, that didn’t go as well as her other album’,” she says, admitting that she may have lost a bit of momentum by waiting so long between releases. “But I’m just mentally in a better place now.”

In fact, Larsson is in a great place. This is her year of radical self-assuredness, after all. The year where she promotes her releases on her feeds without feeling cringe. The year she’s the best Zara Larsson, nay, simply the best ever. “I promise myself,” she says. “I’m going to be my biggest fan.”