Zara Larsson has proven herself to be one of the years’ biggest artists, but while 2026 has been her breakthrough, she doesn’t want to be seen as a “new” artist.
The 28-year-old Swedish pop star first emerged back in 2013 as a teenager, but despite having five albums under her belt, she has instructed her former label Sommer House/Epic not to pursue a Best New Artist nomination for her at next year’s Grammy Awards.
In a new interview with Perfect, the Stockholm native acknowledges that things have certainly changed for her this year, but it’s all just been building up to this moment.
“I definitely feel that there’s a shift in my career and in how people are reacting to me and my music,” Larsson says. “I was lucky enough to have a really big hit with my first song, ‘Uncover’, in Scandinavia. Then ‘Lush Life’ and ‘Never Forget You’ went really well. But it never felt like one song was building up to something bigger. It felt like I had these big songs, and they weren’t really tied to my artistry.”
Larsson says that she was approached her label about submitting her name to the Recording Academy for Best New Artist, but rejected the idea.
“I was speaking to my former label about this, and they were like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to see if we can put you in Best New Artist for the Grammys.’ And I’m like, I don’t even want that,” she says. “That would downplay the 13 years of me being an artist. I’m not a new artist.”
Instead, Larsson prefers to see herself as a “breakthrough” artist, because she says “it feels like the whole world is looking at me at the same time. Before, this song was successful over here, and another song a year later was successful over there. Now it feels like it’s all coming together quite nicely.”
Larsson believes things began to change when she took control of her career and made 2025’s Midnight Sun, which earned her an American Music Award for - you guessed it - Breakthrough Album of the Year.
“I think it was a confidence thing,” she explains. “I started out so young. I had just turned 13 when I signed my record deal. I always picked my songs, but a lot of it was handed to me. It didn’t really grow from inside of me. That made me confused about, well, what do I think?”
“For the first time, I did all that with Midnight Sun. I wrote all the songs, and I decided who I wanted to create this world with. The visual world is made with director Charlotte Rutherford. The songs are made with a small team who I love. Everything else is done by a small team. I immersed myself in things that I care about but previously felt I didn’t have the knowledge to do,” she adds. “It was like, ‘Well, I don’t know how to program lights, so I don’t think I can say much about that.’ But you don’t have to know. You can just say, ‘I don’t like that’, or ‘I like this a lot.’”
Read the full interview here.