Given that pop star years are like dog years, Sweden’s Zara Larsson might be worried about taking four between albums. Ariana Grande has come up with three long-players since Larsson’s So Good in 2017. Taylor Swift has made four.
Larsson has time on her side, however. Known for her singing in Sweden since she won their version of Britain’s Got Talent aged 10, she’s still only 23, and she hasn’t really been away. Her songs Symphony (with Clean Bandit) and Lush Life spent more than a year each on the UK chart and are both tantalisingly close to joining Spotify’s billion streams club. Rather than an album being an important landmark, this is more of a convenient collection of recent singles, with six of its songs already available and the oldest, Ruin My Life, dating all the way back to October 2018.
That means it doesn’t hang together particularly convincingly. A few tracks are sonically more inventive – such as Love Me Land, with its bassy throbs and dramatic strings, and the Marshmello production WOW, on which her voice is made fully alien – while others, such as Look What You’ve Done, are satisfied that sounding a bit like ABBA is enough.
Larsson is an outspoken presence on social media, and some of that forthright attitude comes across on the sweary What Happens Here. She could get away with being more musically daring. Like the catchiest song, Need Someone, Poster Girl is peppy and fun but not really worth waiting for.
