Zara Larsson wants to be “the number one”.
The 27-year-old singer views her ambitious streak as a “blessing and a curse” because her success never feels “good enough” because she is always pressuring herself to do better, which she admitted can be “kind of annoying”.
She told the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast: “ When you’re super-ambitious, I think that’s the blessing and the curse.
“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.”
Zara regrets leaving four years between her previous albums, 2017’s So Good and 2021’s Poster Girl and admitted she scrapped a lot of material during that time period because she didn’t feel it was good enough.
She said: “I think it’s probably one of my biggest mistakes to have had such a huge gap between my albums.
“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.’”
The Midnight Sun singer pays no attention to what her fellow artists are doing and deliberately avoids new music when she’s in the recording studio.
She said: “Honestly, I don’t really give a f*** what other people are doing.
“[When I’m recording] 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.”
When it came to the title track for her new album, Midnight Sun, Zara had spent years working on it and scrapped a number of concepts.
She admitted: “I’ve probably written five songs called Midnight Sun. 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.”