Zara Larsson isn’t as freshly hatched as she looks. Though her 20th birthday is still six months away, she has sung professionally since she won the Swedish version of Britain’s Got Talent at the age of 10. Having said last year that all she wanted was for people to look at her, she’s got her wish – Larsson is the undisputed superstar of Scandipop, and a constant in the charts. Tonight’s tickets sold out quickly enough for a follow-up autumn tour of 4,000-seaters to have been hastily arranged. Meanwhile, expect to encounter her at a dozen summer festivals.
Larsson reached this point by refining Scandipop’s quirks into hook-studded tropical house and dancehall , her personality funnelled in via a breezy delivery. On stage, this plays out even more winningly than on her records. We don’t see much of the steeliness she exhibits off stage, where she robustly calls out misogynists and homophobes, but she’s no germ-free talent-show adolescent. Equipped with an hour’s worth of bangers, a gold leotard and far more vocal expressiveness than in her recorded work, she alchemises the ingredients into something that feels like a rehearsal for bigger rooms.
With her band stowed on a platform overhead, she has the stage space to create a show that’s a bolt of sugar and colour. Her warm opener, the MNEK collaboration Never Forget You – MNEK himself is here, in fine, keening voice – is an antidote to grim headlines, and the 2016 electropop staple Girls Like is just as inexorable a mood-lifter. It posits Larsson as a particularly peppy cheerleader, belting it out with her hair-thrashing dance squad parading behind.
“Peppy” is accurate – Larsson has developed an American accent and an Americanised sunniness (she’s “really, really happy to be here”) that must startle them in Stockholm. Yet she retains enough of her sardonic European spirit to be going on with. Most pop shows offer a ballad segment involving mood lighting and a chair; Larsson takes it to the parodic nth degree, with shattering top notes, complemented by a squealing guitar solo that could trigger earthquakes.
The one thing she doesn’t do – but should – is milk the applause. The chart-topping Symphony is no sooner over than she leaves the stage, and, while she returns for a rapturous Lush Life, she’s modest in a way that would be alien to her heroine Beyoncé. Something to work on before the next tour.
