Music analysis: How Zara Larsson’s career led to her new remix album ‘Midnight Sun: Girls Trip’
Zara Larsson released a remix album titled ‘Midnight Sun: Girls Trip’ on May 1 that has collaborations with some big female artists.
Music News Blitz’s Amelie Da Costa provides a summary on what led to this new album.
Early career success
Larsson is a Swedish singer/songwriter who started her career in music in 2013, where she debuted her EP ‘Introducing’, which featured her first single ‘Undercover’, which was later certified triple platinum in her country.
She then went on to release her first album in 2014 titled ‘1’, which consisted of 14 tracks with three singles hitting the Swedish Top Ten.
Though it wasn’t until 2015, where she had her international breakthrough with two of her songs – ‘Lush Life’ and ‘Never Forget You (featuring MNEK)’ – which both hit the Top Ten across Europe and the Top Ten in Great Britain.
Both songs featured on her second album ‘So Good’ which was released March 17, 2017, and included other hits such as ‘I Would Like’ and ‘Symphony’ which was a collaboration with the band Clean Bandit.
After multiple collaborations and hit songs in the 2010s, Zara carried on releasing music into the 2020s, but they didn’t chart very well and caused most of the public to forget about her.
The trend that opened up new beginnings
In August 2024, the ‘Symphony’ dolphin meme blew up on TikTok. The meme then became a trend of people using a colorful dolphin image with ironic confessions to the chorus of ‘Symphony’.
The song was then rediscovered seven years later and got Zara’s name back out into the public.
This caused Zara Larsson to rebrand her image and take on the bright colours and the summery aesthetic, which she later confirmed influenced her new era on the Zach Sang Show in September 2025.
With the new found popularity, Larsson released her second title track single for her fifth album ‘Midnight Sun’ on June 13, 2025, with the music video touching into the summer aesthetic with bright colours, following in the themes of the TikTok trend.
The song took over TikTok for a while and charted internationally, peaking at number 4 in Sweden and reaching the top 40 in multiple countries, including the UK, Australia and Canada.
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The new album that changed it all
Her fifth album ‘Midnight Sun’ was released on September 26, 2025, and consists of 10 tracks with a few other hit songs such as ‘Pretty Ugly’, which was the first single, and ‘Hot & Sexy’.
On May 1, 2026, she then released a remix album titled ‘Midnight Sun: Girls Trip’ – an album of the same songs remixed with other female collaborators such as PinkPantheress, Shakira, Tyla and Madison Beer.
So far, the remix album has been successful, with one song ‘Eurosummer - Girls Trip’ alongside Shakira reaching 3,8 million streams on Spotify.
It looks like Larsson has followed in Charli XCX’s footsteps with this remix album as she was another artist who’s popularity came back after her release of the album ‘BRAT’ in 2024, where she later made a remix album titled ‘Brat and its completely different but still also brat’.
Charli’s remix album also featured collaborators on every song such as Ariana Grande, Troye Sivan, Lorde and Billie Eilish.
Zara Larsson is killing it in her career and has reached 70.9 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and we don't think she’s dropping in the charts anytime soon.
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