Zara Larsson – Midnight Sun

We check out the bit of the Zara Larsson revival we didn’t already cover 11 years ago… 

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[6.22]Joshua Lu: Zara Larsson is the latest sub-B-list pop star to enjoy a chart resurgence, this time bolstered by the strength of her latest album: a genuinely solid piece of work that’s easily her most fully realized. Its title track, “Midnight Sun,” is a summer anthem that somehow works better the further away from summer we get. The endless summertime it portrays is starkly aggressive, one where the sunshine whacks you like booming thunder and the flowerbeds beneath you shake with tremors, giving the song this urgent quality, as if Larsson is clinging to the season by her fingertips and refusing to let it go. Sometimes you have to fight the forces of nature itself to keep the party going.
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Alfred Soto: This summer 2025 hit hasn’t lost its charm. When she’s looped around the thudding chorus, it will make even the most fervent beach haters kick sand. We need sunlight this winter, but, failing this, Larsson will show her tanlines.
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Julian Axelrod: Zara Larsson it seems I’ve grown quite fond of you tho there are no sexual urges or desires you come to me as a long lost friend whom I once picked apples with in papa’s orchard
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Claire Davidson: Zara Larsson has always been a talented performer underserved by the trends around her, serving a brand of maximalist, Scandi-inflected earnestness that’s historically been at odds with the small-scale shift pop experienced in the mid-2010s, right around the time she began to cross over with “Lush Life.” For proof of just how porous Larsson’s pop identity has become, look to the circumstances that shaped Midnight Sun. After her 2017 Clean Bandit collaboration “Symphony” went viral thanks to a TikTok meme, Larsson’s team at Epic decided to lean into the trend’s Lisa Frank-style imagery to shape the aesthetic of her latest album, blending lyrical evocations of summer flings and carefree nights with Y2K-hued visuals. All of which, in a deeply cynical outcome, led to Midnight Sun becoming her most successful album in a decade, in her native Sweden and otherwise. To Larsson’s credit, this title track is probably the best-case scenario for how this pivot could’ve materialized: the sweetly chirping synths, which glide over the track’s roiling Jersey club beat, give Larsson’s ebullient soprano ample space to breathe, making the lyrics’ gentle infatuation feel genuinely lovestruck. What Larsson has lost in her attempt to follow trends, though, is the opportunity to display her unique vocal prowess with real abandon. She does push her voice to the limit on the song’s hook, but her soaring tonal command is lost on the rest of the track, which simply ramps up the beat and stretches her vocal runs ad infinitum, rather than give her some real melodic shine for support. “Midnight Sun” may have gained some purchase at gay guy music video nights last year, but it’s a far cry from the pure pop machinery of a song like… oh, I don’t know, “Padam Padam.”
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Will Adams: How refreshing for a breakout to actually sound exciting! (Contrast with the dull “Lush Life” inexplicably having a concurrent resurgence.) “Midnight Sun” turns the saturation to 11 and cranks the Jersey club beat accordingly, over which Zara coasts on promises of sandy, sun-soaked partying. Docking a point for the abrupt way the extended, undulating “suUuUuUuUn” hook cuts out before the following line “a never ending…”; I’m all for vocal production sleight of hand when I can’t see the seams.
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Ian Mathers: Between her underwhelming appearance on that PinkPantheress remix and how little Larsson is adding to the perfectly fine, pro-forma boshing here (yes, even the bit where she’s yodeling “sun” for a while), she is fast becoming the current moment’s “we have Swedish pop at home” for me.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: An internet-core jumble of glorious sounds and switch ups that gives me that same high as when Gaga shouts “Free WomAyAyaAyAayaAyNNNNnNN!” Zara Larsson has been making hits for a nearly decade and is always vying for a spot for main pop girl. Let’s pray that 2026 is the year the universe might bring some cosmic justice.
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Nortey Dowuona: Nah. (Margo XS and MNEK kilt the beat, tho.)
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Hannah Jocelyn: For some reason, members of the so-called “Khia asylum” turn to this genre when they want to get experimental, and it pretty much always works: the 2-step Julia Michaels’ “Sorry To Me Too” and Daya’s “Don’t Call” are both fantastic. I do like this type of uplifting breakbeat pop music, but infusing it with Jersey Club doesn’t make it novel enough. The chorus melody blends into the already frenetic production until she goes “nevereeeeending midnight suuuun”, the only memorable part before the drop; everything else might as well be gibberish. But the ensuing drop is fantastic, the two-note melisma alone justifying how weirdly inert the song is otherwise — Larsson is the weakest part of her own song, as the remix with Muni Long proves. Either way, Helena Gao, MNEK, and Margo XS are absolutely in their element, and I could see this growing on me. (I’m not one for rooting for old songs to chart, but if “Lush Life” is back, can we get MNEK’s “Correct” next? That’s a [10].)
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