Swedish pop star ‘s next album, Midnight Sun, due Sept. 26, will include the confessional track “Ambition,” which she describes as her most honest song — complete with lyrics about comparing herself to other performers as she stares at her phone late at night. “That’s the thing with ambition,” she sings. “Everything’s a competition.”
“ When you’re super-ambitious, I think that’s the blessing and the curse,” she says in the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now. “You can have so many amazing things happening to you, but nothing’s ever gonna be good enough for your soul… I’m a very happy person in general, I love my life, but there is still that voice in my head that will always kind of be nagging on, like, ‘You can do more. You can do better’…. It’s kind of annoying to live life that way, but I just want to be, like, the number one. Even just for a moment.”
As it turns out, Midnight Sun‘s just-released title track might well be hooky enough to take Larsson there. In the episode, she talks about the making of that song, and much more. Some highlights follow — to hear the whole interview, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.
Larsson recorded and scrapped as many as five albums during the four-year gap between 2017’s So Good and 2021’s Poster Girl. “I think it’s probably one of my biggest mistakes to have had such a huge gap between my albums,” she says. “I definitely had that because I felt so pressured of having to have this huge commercial follow up. I must have had five albums in those four years that I was just like, ‘No, no, no, not good enough. Let’s start over.’”
“Midnight Sun” was years in the making, with multiple attempts to capture the concept. “I’ve probably written five songs called ‘Midnight Sun,’” she says. “I’m like, ‘I like that title. I really want it. Because it just reminds me of home. And also I think the more I travel and the older I get, I wanna be reminded of home and my roots and a Swedish summer night.”
Her new single’s hard-hitting dance beats are something of an anomaly in current U.S. pop — but Larsson isn’t trying to follow trends. “Honestly, I don’t really give a fuck what other people are doing,” she says with a laugh. When she’s recording, she adds, “I usually go into podcast mode, like I listen to a lot of podcasts and a lot of ASMR and just kind of tune out from what everyone else is releasing and doing. The trends of music go up and down.”
Her mom trailed her in her years a teen pop star, which kept her protected. “Even so, there’s definitely been situations where I’m like, oh, that’s kind of weird, even though she was there,” she says. “You meet executives and they’re like, ‘we should do drugs.’ And it’s like, ‘I’m 16!’”
She had a ‘witchy’ premonition before her track “Symphony” with Clean Bandit went viral on TikTok last year. “It’s so funny because one or two weeks before,” she says, “I had this weird witchy feeling of like, I feel like one of my old songs gonna blow up on TikTok. I thought it would be [2015’s] ‘Lush Life!’”
She’s not thrilled about Dr. Luke‘s return to working with mainstream artists. “I’m like, why?” she says. “There’s a million other people. Is it really, really important for him to come back? I don’t think so. I personally wouldn’t do it because what is he gonna do for me or for anyone else? I think that the most powerful thing you can do is to actually put your money where your mouth is and work with women and hire women and do all of that. So I think that’s way more powerful than writing a feminist anthem with someone who is not really like standing for those values.”
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