Zara Larsson: “Pop girls are expected to constantly reinvent themselves”

Zara Larsson is struggling to connect. No, really. Halfway through our interview, her Zoom cuts out not once but twice. “Sorry, my phone died. It’s not charging. Hold up… there we go!” she says with a sigh of relief after scrambling about to find a plug for her mobile. So, it wasn’t something we said? A mischievous smile flickers across Zara’s face as she pretends to end the call again

Pristine vocals? Check. Catchy tunes? Of course. Huge streaming numbers? Bingo – 28 million monthly Spotify listeners and counting. But what sets the chart-topping Swede apart from her pop peers is her playful sense of humour and frankly refreshing ability to express an opinion. Case in point: NME asks Zara about the pressure put on female singers to constantly usher in new ‘eras’ of music – typically signposted by a fresh hairdo – compared to some of their male counterparts, who can just dust off their plaid shirts and shuffle on stage, guitar in hand.

“Totally. You’re speaking about Ed Sheeran. I hear and I agree. Like, he has been on his ‘Maths’ journey through his whole career. For pop girls, specifically, it’s like you expect them to reinvent and reinvent and reinvent,” she stresses. “I don’t think it necessarily means you have to come up with a new side of yourself every time. The right way to do that is to, actually, not find another side, but maybe dig deeper into what you’re doing.”

All that digging is paying off. The 26-year-old – who first rose to fame on the Swedish version of Got Talent in 2008 – has mined gold on her third international album ‘Venus’, out now, the follow-up to 2021’s Poster Girl. “I was stressed about like, fuck, maybe this sounds like all the other stuff that I’ve released,” she says, before adding: “[But] it made me feel like I am still just doing me and, hopefully, evolving in my visual world, in how I perform, in how I carry myself.”

Zara explores the theme of love in its many different guises, the messy, the painful and the euphoric. She is, by the way, sickeningly happy with her partner, dancer Lamin Holmén. “If anyone had a peek into my relationship, be a fly on the wall, they’d be like, ‘She’s insane,’” she exclaims. “I had my best friend over a couple of days ago, and she was like, ‘You have to stop.’ I just walk around telling my boyfriend, ‘I love you so much. You are perfect. You are beautiful. You are so sexy.’”

The throbbing club-ready record was chiefly made with legendary producer Rick Nowels, whose previous credits include Madonna and Lana Del Rey. “I said, ‘What are we going to do with this? Sonically, what world are we creating?’ And he replied, ‘Fuck that. We are just going to make really good songs.’ We spoke it through, and I agreed with him,” Zara recalls. “If you listen through my catalogue, especially my early stuff, it’s so all over the place, and that’s just who I am as a person.”

However, the pair didn’t always see eye to eye during the recording process. “Rick is a very, very, very stubborn person and so am I. He would say, ‘I don’t like that,’ and I would say, ‘Well, I like that.’ We would do that back and forth,’” she continues. “At first, it was hard to vibe with him, but… he’s special. I learned so much about myself and songwriting. I really enjoyed that he expected stuff from me. He held me to a standard that I want to be held to.”

Zara also reunited with close pal MNEK (“one of my favourite writers”), notably on her latest single ‘You Love Who You Love’, a strutting, early Rihanna-esque anthem for anybody stuck in a toxic relationship. “I feel a lot of emotions when I tell my friends, ‘Stand the fuck up. What are you doing on the floor? You deserve so much better,’” she says. “I’ve been in that situation many times, and I’ve also been on the opposite side of it where my friends have been like, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Why are you with this person? They treat you like shit.’”

On the striking and stripped-back (literally) album cover, Zara honours the titular goddess of beauty and love by recreating Botticelli’s famous Birth of Venus painting. “We had an album cover that we shot back in February last year, but I felt like that cover wasn’t a good fit anymore,” she explains. “I called my friend and said, ‘We have to do this shoot, we have to do it now.’ We got in his studio – I mean, it didn’t really require much styling. It required a little shell and some long hair, that was basically it!”

“I think nudity in general… doesn’t have to be a sexual thing. I’m a very naked person. I love to be on the beaches in southern Europe or even Sweden. I’ll be the first one to take my top off. I’m from a family who were very comfortable with that. I remember growing up, my mum and dad had to tell me, ‘Can you please put on a shirt when we’re eating?” I’d be like, ‘Eurgh!’” she says. “I felt really confident and comfortable and empowered in doing that shoot. It wasn’t nerve-wracking at all. You’re in your birthday suit, there’s nothing I can hide behind.”

Channelling her inner goddess, stepping into her power, seems particularly apt given that Zara recently launched her own label, Sommer House, and reacquired her back catalogue from Sony. “It’s just an incredible opportunity. It’s like security. It’s like my retirement fund. It’s nice because I get to be in control over all the songs that I’ve released. No one can just use it in a weird commercial without my blessing, or no one can use it in a really bad song as a sample. My record label, as of now, it’s a place where my songs get to live and rest,” she ponders.

“It could bring me to a place where I feel like I want to sign other artists and then when my deal with Epic is up, when I’ve done the albums, am I going to re-sign with them? Am I going to go somewhere else? Will I then just be on my record label and do things independently? That is a very exciting future to look into. The older I get, the more power over creating stuff I want. I still want the big numbers. I still want a lot of streams. I want a lot of people in the crowd of my shows. But my focus has shifted from being loved and validated.”

It is all-go for Zara at the moment, so much so that she doesn’t realise what day it is (“Oh my god, it’s Friday, I didn’t even know!”). Indeed, this year she’ll make her acting debut in Netflix drama A Part of You. “It’s such a nepotism thing of me being in the movie because my best friend wrote the script, so I didn’t really have a choice. I did have to go and do the audition, which I think was only so they could say, ‘She did audition,’” she says with a laugh, adding with comic vehemence that she has no plans to one day star in a film musical: “I hate musicals. I felt fooled when I was watching Wonka and the first thing that’s happening is a song. I was like, what the flip is going on?!”

Later in February, Zara will embark on her tour, including two nights at London’s iconic Roundhouse on the 21st and 22nd – and she urged punters to, please, leave their punnets of produce at home. “I’ll never forget when someone threw a tomato at me. That was very medieval, very cartoonish,” Zara balks. “It was this young guy. It was my peak writing days on my blog, where I was talking a lot about feminism. I think they didn’t like that…  it’s like, behave, damn!” This pop goddess has spoken, be on your best behaviour.

Zara Larsson’s ‘Venus’ is out now

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