It is staggering to think how long Zara Larsson has been on the music scene considering she is only twenty seven years old and one of her biggest streaming hits was released a decade ago. Her story began even earlier when she was ten years old, winning Talang, Sweden’s version of Got Talent. Like many reality show champions she notched early chart hits, but unlike most her fame never fizzled. It grew. Lush Life and her collaboration with MNEK on Never Forget You became global anthems, both clocking up billions of streams. Those singles established her as a reliable hitmaker even if her albums were often seen as less essential. That changes with her fifth studio album Midnight Sun.
Across ten tracks she delivers a slick, confident record that doubles down on her love of dance pop while feeling more purposeful than anything she has released before. The concept reaches back to her Swedish roots, drawing inspiration from the northern regions of the country that experience the phenomenon of a literal midnight sun during the summer. The album carries that glow: bright, buoyant and fleeting at just over thirty minutes, but never lacking in quality. Larsson herself has said she wanted it to exist outside the usual summer window, to bring light whenever it is needed.
The title track feels like the natural lead single, shimmering and euphoric, while the official lead Pretty Ugly finds a better home within the album’s flow than it first suggested on release. Ethereal tones run through the record in both sound and lyricism. Blue Moon offers the starry plea “Shine on me / Tell me I look beautiful underneath the stars” while Midnight Sun echoes the same celestial imagery: “Connected / I’m so in touch with it all / Feel protected/ By the moon and the stars.”
Larsson’s voice has always been her strongest asset but here she allows it to take full flight. The renewed spotlight on her vocals earlier this year, when she opened for Tate McRae and clips of her set went viral, adds weight to the confidence that radiates across the album. Viewers were struck by how effortlessly she filled the room and how she seemed to outshine the act she was billed beneath. Midnight Sun arrives in the midst of that buzz and cements her position as a pop star who is owning her craft.
There are moments of pure fun, from Eurosummer, a Eurovision ready rush of sangria and easyJet references that reunites her with MNEK, to the camp delight of Hot & Sexy, which unexpectedly samples Tiffany “New York” Pollard’s legendary Celebrity Big Brother rant. It is as absurd as it is brilliant, and “Puss Puss 97 on the number plate” is destined to live long on gay Twitter/X.
The reflective tracks land just as hard. The Ambition is Larsson at her most candid, revealing her hunger for stardom and her insecurities side by side: “I wanna be your star / I wanna be loved” sits alongside the vulnerable “What does she have that I don’t?” Saturns Return picks up the thread, celebrating naivety as a kind of freedom: “Could be wrong / Could be right / But this song is mine.” This should have been the closer in favour of Puss Puss and would have been a powerful full stop on an album that finally presents Zara Larsson at her brightest.
4.5/5
Zara Larsson’s ‘Midnight Sun’ is released on Friday 26th September 2025 on Sommer House/Epic Records.
