Zara Larsson Doesn't Want Summer to End on New Song ‘Midnight Sun'
Swedish pop singer Zara Larsson has shared a new song, 'Midnight Sun,' which will serve as the title track from her upcoming fourth album, out Sept. 26.
'Midnight Sun' teeters the between ebullient and delirious, with production that nods to frenetic house breakbeats, serene trance synths, and big tent EDM build-ups. Larsson's vocals and lyrics, meanwhile, give the track pop gem of the summer potential: 'It's the midnight sun, kissed skin under the red sky,' she sings on the chorus, 'Laying on your chest like this/Hold me like the pebbles in your hand, initials in the sand/Summer isn't over yet.'
More from Rolling Stone
Zara Larsson Gets Glammed Up to Get Down and Dirty in 'Pretty Ugly' Video
Tate McRae Prepares for Massive 2025 With Album, Tour Announcement
How Dolphin Memes Revived a 7-Year-Old Zara Larsson, Clean Bandit Classic
In a statement, Larsson said 'Midnight Sun' was inspired by the long summer days in Sweden where 'the sun never goes down.' She added, 'I wanted the whole album to feel like it's a summer night and it never ends. And it doesn't matter if it's December: the summer night will be there for you. It's waiting for you, it will come back for you, and you will come back for it.'
This is the second song Larsson has shared from Midnight Sun, following 'Pretty Ugly,' which arrived back in April. Larsson recorded her new album over the lat year working with frequent collaborator MNEK, along with producers Margo XS and Zhone.
Of the album, Larsson added, 'Throughout Midnight Sun, I get to just capture that total Scandinavian vibe, which is something that I have grown up with — it's a huge part of me, my happiest memories and my saddest ones, too. A part of my soul is a Swedish summer night. This record encompasses that, how life is so beautiful it makes you cry. It just feels like me—knowing myself, this album is just really, really me. And also. No one can do me the way I can.'
Midnight Sun will follow Larsson's 2024 album, Venus. She's set to hit the road later this summer, providing support for Tate McRae on her headlining tour, which kicks off Aug. 4 in Vancouver and wraps Sept. 27 in Los Angeles. After that, Larsson will embark on a headlining European run of her own in October.
Best of Rolling Stone
Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs
The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs
All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


New York Times
an hour ago
- New York Times
Gunilla Knutson, Star of ‘Take It Off' Shaving Cream Ads, Dies at 84
A blond Swedish model named Gunilla Knutson holds a can of shaving cream to her cheek and gazes deeply into the camera. 'Nothing takes it off like Noxzema medicated shave,' she says. In a 60-second commercial from 1966 that rings with double entendre, the jazzy instrumental 'The Stripper' plays as a man shaves his face in rhythmic strokes timed to the bump-and-grind of the music. When the camera returns to a tight close-up of Ms. Knutson (pronounced KUH-noots-son), she utters seven of the most famous words from that era of advertising. 'Take it off,' she says, before pausing slightly. 'Take it all off.' In another ad from the campaign, Ms. Knutson strips the rind from a lime, licks her thumb slowly and hums 'The Stripper.' 'Men,' she says. 'Noxzema shave cream now comes in lime, too. So take it off.' Ms. Knutson, for whom the Noxzema campaign represented the peak of her fame, died on Feb. 3 in Ystad, Sweden, where she was born and where she had lived since leaving Manhattan a few years ago. She was 84. Her death was not widely reported at the time. Her son, Andreas von Scheele, said she died in a hospital after dealing with multiple medical issues. He and her husband, Per von Scheele, are her only immediate survivors. Gunilla Karin Maria Knutson was born on Nov. 14, 1940, to Einar and Sonja Knutson, who divorced when she was young. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.


Fox News
an hour ago
- Fox News
Miley Cyrus turns heads in barely-there ensemble during Parisian night out
Miley Cyrus showed off her toned abs when she stepped out in Paris wearing a sheer dress. The 32-year-old former Disney star was photographed outside her hotel as she left for a night out on the town in a light blue sheer Jean Paul Gaultier gown that featured a coned bra covered in peacock feathers. She accessorized the look with black underwear that was visible through the fabric, black leather opera gloves and knee-high brown sandals with cutouts. She styled her hair in big messy curls and opted for minimal makeup. The actress shared photos of the look on her Instagram, captioning the post, "Paris is the place for me… I love you all." "This look is one of my favorites you've ever done," one fan wrote in the comment section with a heart-eyed emoji. Another added, "What a queeennnn," while a third chimed in with "You are THAT LEGEND." Fans of the actress also couldn't hold back their excitement at having seen Cyrus perform on stage with Beyoncé as part of her "Cowboy Carter" tour in Paris. The two sang the song "II Most Wanted," on which Cyrus collaborated with Beyoncé. "Thank You for singing Most wanted with Beyoncé Today," one fan wrote in the comments section, while another added, "Omg you did it II most wanted." The actress has been spotted in a number of showstopping outfits during her time in Paris, including a knit leopard print Valentino dress with a fringe collar and a vintage black Patrick Kelly dress with rhinestones in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. Cyrus is in Paris to promote her latest visual album, "Something Beautiful," and its accompanying film, which premiered earlier this month at the Tribeca Film Festival. As part of the promotional tour, she performed at Spotify's Billions Club Live, hosted at Maxim's de Paris, where she sang two of her biggest hits, "The Climb" and "We Can't Stop." She took the stage in a vintage 1992 sequined Mugler minidress, which mixed light and dark shades of blue. When discussing her latest album on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" in May, Cyrus opened up about how filming one of the music videos for her visual album ended with her in the ICU after her "leg began to disintegrate" after filming. "And then the doctor goes, 'Do you have any idea why you would have such a brutal infection on your kneecap?'' she said on the show. "To have a surgeon look at you and say, 'Yuck.' … They open up cadavers. They see inside the guts of humans, and they're looking at me, telling me I'm disgusting. And they do brain operations."
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Troubadour Eric Andersen on New Album and Why ‘A Complete Unknown' Was a Tad ‘Sugarcoated'
It's taken a few months, since he lives in the Netherlands, but Eric Andersen finally found time to watch A Complete Unknown. And the troubadour legend, who haunted those same Village clubs during that same time, was…a bit underwhelmed. 'It seemed a little sugarcoated,' he says. 'It was a little two-dimensional. But I found it quite amusing and quite entertaining. I was looking at it more like a cinematic situation than something I knew. I was watching a movie. So, I enjoyed it from that standpoint.' More from Rolling Stone It's the Perfect Time For a Pulp Reunion Watch Bob Dylan Perform a Stunning 'All Along the Watchtower' With Billy Strings Watch Bob Dylan's Shocking Cover of Ricky Nelson's 'Garden Party' Then again, Andersen has a right to critique. At this point, many of the songwriters and musicians from that hallowed Greenwich Village scene have either died (mostly recently Peter Yarrow) or retired from touring (like Tom Paxton last year). Only a handful of those who helped make the Village a musical hotbed are still out performing and even making new albums — Bob Dylan, of course, along with Judy Collins, Carolyn Hester, Noel Paul Stookey, and very few others. Andersen, who turned 82 this year, is also still on that list. Although he's never had a Top 40 hit, the American-born songwriter has written a handful of songs that are part of that new American folk songbook — 'Violets of Dawn,' 'Thirsty Boots' — and albums like 1972's Blue River are considered high-water marks of the genre. His impact was especially felt on the recent tribute album Songpoet: Songs of Eric Andersen, which includes renditions of his songs by Dylan, Linda Ronstadt, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Amy Helm, Lenny Kaye, Dom Flemons, Willie Nile, the duo of Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams, and the late Rick Danko (who formed a band with Andersen shortly before his death). In the last few decades, Andersen, who moved to Norway for a period and then relocated to Amsterdam 20 years ago, has occasionally returned to the U.S. for shows. In those years, he's made albums based on the words of Lord Byron, Albert Camus and German writer Heinrich Böll; released a collection of his own spoken-word pieces; saluted his peers with recordings of Village covers (The Street Was Always There); and cut a full-album, live-recreation of Blue River. But last month, he finally rolled out his first new set of songs, Dance of Love and Death, in over 20 years. With its ruminative ballads and rhythms, the album is very much of a piece with the territory Andersen began carving out for himself when he arrived in New York in the Sixties. Like Dylan, he was championed by New York Times music critic Robert Shelton, which also helped Andersen land a record deal. With songs like 'Close the Door Lightly When You Go' and 'Come to My Bedside,' Andersen injected an air of mystery and sensuality into the scene. He befriended the likes of Paxton, Collins, and the late Phil Ochs and witnessed an increasingly isolated Dylan spar with his peers at the Kettle of Fish bar. He was so ingrained in that world that, he says, he missed Dylan's historic Newport 1965 show because he was booked into the Gaslight Café, one of the essential Village venues. Talking about the way that community has been recreated in films, Andersen feels that another recent movie rings a bit more true than A Complete Unknown. '[Inside] Llewyn Davis was much more of the scene that I remember,' he says. 'Even to the point where I went up to Vanguard Records to get some money, and the guy actually handed me a $20 bill. I was living on the Lower East Side cooking for junkies and I needed the money to go to the vegetable market to buy stuff for them. I was walking back home, and I just stopped at the Vanguard offices. There's a scene identical to that in Llewyn Davis. It couldn't have come from me, but the vibe, the scene, and the lighting was more realistic than the other film.' Along with many of his peers at the time, Andersen isn't a character in A Complete Unknown, although he took heart in Ochs' 'There But for Fortune' heard in one of Monica Barbaro's Joan Baez performance scenes. 'That was really beautiful,' he says. 'That came out being the best song in the film, which is hard to believe, because there are so many great songs. What was a little bit tragic was that Bob was such a word guy. He can talk. Not chatty, but he said things, you know. Usually talking about writing and stuff like that. None of that seemed to come through. But you can't do much in a movie. You got to gloss things over.' Whether it's the result of those movies or a degree of rediscovery, Andersen has felt more openness to his style and that era than he has in a while. 'I remember playing a couple of shows in Boston, when parents took their kids,' he says. 'And they were the ones who came up to talk to me. Maybe it blew their minds that somebody could stand up there and sing songs about things they think about. Maybe there's some kind of deprivation going on in terms of their musical world. I don't know. But even though their parents dragged them to this show, they were the ones who got it, which was funny.' Starting during that period and continuing over the decades, Andersen very much lived the life of the wandering, nomadic poet-writer. He was featured in an early Andy Warhol film, appeared on Johnny Cash's TV variety show, wrote songs about his close relationships with Janis Joplin ('Pearl's Goodtime Blues') and Patti Smith ('Wild Crow Blues'), and asked Joni Mitchell to be the godmother to his daughter. He's also had his share of disappointments: signing with Beatles manager Brian Epstein right before Epstein's death and having the tapes for his all-important follow-up to Blue River lost. (They were finally discovered and released, but 20 years later.) Over its 17 songs, Dance of Love and Death reflects on some of those past times, most movingly in 'Every Once in a While,' about his wife Debbie Green, who died in 2017. 'Were you jealous of my future? Was I jealous of your past?' he sings. 'Yeah, that was about her,' Andersen says. 'I think everybody has a situation where you think about somebody every once in a while and that person comes back, and I just sat down and that song poured out.' The album also has moments of harrowing storytelling ('River Spree [Berlin],' about a junkie), relative lightheartedness ('After This Life'), and his signature deep-voiced intimate romanticism (the title song). Although Andersen isn't known as a topical songwriter, he also ventured into that topic with the climate change-inspired 'Season in Crime (Crime Scene),' spurred on by a California tour with violinist and Dylan alumnus Scarlet Rivera. 'She was living in Topanga Canyon and her house was going to burn down,' he says. 'We were talking about sparks and embers in the air. It started to write itself. It doesn't take much to start a song.' Thanks to producer Steve Addabbo and contributing musicians like Kaye and Dylan bassist Tony Garnier, the music is a mix of chamber-folk beauty and galloping rock & roll. In early September, Andersen will return to the States for a month of shows on the East Coast. He's read or heard about international musicians who've supposedly had their visas revoked or have had to deal with profit-depleting tariffs when they arrive. 'So far, it's full steam ahead,' says Andersen, who has American and Dutch passports. 'But things are evolving very rapidly. Everybody's on edge. I want to come over with my guitar and maybe they'll say, 'Well, you know ….,' because I'm a resident overseas. It'll be interesting.' About any unlikely detainment, he jokes, 'If I have one call to make, it'll be to you.' Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time