Music review: Zara Larsson's new album Poster girl

I heard Zara Larsson for the first time in 2012, at a demo that the legendary record company director Ola Håkansson presented to me.

I lost my breath.

What an incredible singer!  

That the strength and the fairly finished character in the voice came from a young, former talent TV winner from Enskede, was not my first guess.

But, that the same voice had every chance of finding a really large audience, I was hardly alone in believing.

Ola's American colleagues cheered and wondered which urban district in the USA this fifteen-year-old came from.  

None of us knew at the time

that Zara's voice could flourish in other senses.

That the excellent pop music she started releasing the following year to Sweden and the world was just part of who she 

as an artist.

A kind of modern Sweden image personified.

One such as Volvo, Ingmar Bergman and the covid strategy.

Larsson aimed for a contemporary hit, three-lane highway towards the stars where she herself sat in the front seat and was first in every single lane.

Alongside the music, there was an activist self who spoke out loud on issues of sexism and gender equality, as well as an entrepreneurial self that aimed at a first earned billion before the 25th anniversary cake.  

Nine years later and I am still struck

by Zara Larsson's both soulful and beautiful voice, but had probably expected something more from her first, and several times over, delayed and remade full-lengths in four years. 

The album in question, Poster Girl, is far from a wall painting you just pass by.

On the contrary, it is her best so far in terms of how well it is composed with an elegant turn into the r'n'b where her later, post-Talent story, began and where she seems to belong best.  

Despite countless producers and songwriters (Max Martin, Julia Michaels, Justin Tranter and others), the whole is not as diverse as the debut 1 or even more messy than its predecessor So Good.  

But evenness has a price.

Despite the fact that we get first-class pop music, this 12-track story about love is a bit too careful.

In a world like this, tracks are created that can become long-lived playlist friends like Talk about you, ABBA-like Look what you've done (with its slightly bizarre heated violin) or the completely irresistible Need Someone, but probably no new Lush Life.

If you have some of the world's best music makers in the studio, you can perhaps ask them to point to an even more challenging composition and soundscape that both dresses and makes a world star.  

But above all, it's about herself

.

Caution is not a branch that dresses a Zara Larsson.

Although she sings better than ever, there is something more personal and personal missing.

To earn a poster space on the wall, you must dare to take a seat in the front seat.

And Zara Larsson can do that.

Who, after all, has grown so incredibly far, 23 years old.

I look forward to the sequel.