Brace Yourself, It's Zara Larsson

Since the release of her ubiquitous hit ‘Lush Life’, Zara Larsson has been on the fast track to pop stardom. “I’ve always just wanted people to look at me,” the frank and funny Swedish singer tells Emily Mackay.

- Emily Mackay

That’s Zara Larsson, 18 years old, globally successful singer, trying to explain the source of her drive. The idea that her desire to create “the biggest and longest and tallest” of pop experiences might come down to a fear of mortality is a surprise, because she seems so without fear – hear the words of her ubiquitous hit, ‘Lush Life’: “I live my day as if it was the last / Live my day as if there was no past / Doin’ it all night, all summer / Doin’ it the way I wanna”. In person, too, she seems like the sort who takes her fears, skins them with her exquisitely sharp, raspberry-pink nails, and crafts a glorious future of them.

But Larsson’s worries about the void are less about fragility and more about an impatience to cram in as much as possible before someone bangs that gong. “We’re here for a little, little bit of time, and I just wanna make the most out of it,” she says.

She’s certainly made a lot of her time so far. She was brought up just outside Stockholm, her father a military man and her mother a nurse. Obsessed with Beyoncé since the age of six, she knew early on she wanted to be a singer (“I’ve always just wanted people to look at me,” she says, with bracingly frank self awareness) and at the age of 10 convinced her parents to let her appear on Talang, Sweden’s version of the …Got Talent franchise. She won with a thundering rendition of Céline Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’. It’s worth looking up on YouTube, to witness her self-possession in the face of wind machines, and the shocking force of the sound blasting from such a tiny body.