In Sweden, she’s been a star since she was 10 – but Zara Larsson has her eyes set on global domination.
Aged just 19, the star has racked up seven hits in the last 14 months, including the tropical pop smash Lush Life, which spent more than a year on the charts.
Along the way, she’s collaborated with Tinie Tempah and sung the official anthem of Euro 2016, but the highlight of her year was supporting Beyonce at Wembley Stadium.
“It was the best show on a tour I’ve ever seen. Wembley’s such an incredible stadium. It’s definitely one of the stadiums I want to stand on and have my own tour, one day.”
Although she’s already scored a number one single and album in her home country, Zara is starting from scratch in the UK – and releases her debut album, So Good, this week.
Outgoing and dynamic, she suffers from sleep paralysis.
Writing on her Swedish-language website two years ago, the 19-year-old revealed she frequently has episodes of sleep paralysis.
“Oh my God, it’s scary!” she tells the BBC. “Basically, you wake up and you literally cannot move. Your brain is active, but your body is not yet awake.
“It’s weird. It lasts half a minute maybe – but it kind of feels like you’re trapped there for half an hour.
“I get it a lot when I’m stressed out, or when I have a lot of things going on.”
In 2008, Zara entered Talang Sverige – Sweden’s version of Britain’s Got Talent – mainly because there was no age restriction, unlike X Factor or Swedish Idol.
Singing a heavily-accented, but vocally powerful, version of Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On, she won the contest, and its 500,000 krona (£42,600) prize.
“I sounded like a little guinea pig!” she laughs. But, incredibly, the contest led to nothing.
“Nobody really wanted to sign me, which I was devastated about,” she says. “I was like, ‘oh my gosh, my career’s over and it hasn’t even started yet!’
“I didn’t really want to do anything with Nickelodeon or Disney, so I just went back to school.”
The break may have saved her. Rather than becoming a novelty act, washed up before she was a teenager, Zara re-emerged as a bona fide pop artist on her 15th birthday, with an EP that turned people’s heads.
“When I released the first song, a lot of the people didn’t even recognise me,” she says. “And the people that did were like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s her!’
“So in Sweden, the talent show is like super-irrelevant. And that’s great because usually it’s very hard to wipe off that kind of Got Talent stain.
When Zara released Lush Life in January last year, a lot of people thought it was Rihanna’s comeback single.
“I don’t know where it comes from but even my mom is like, ‘You sound like Rihanna,'” says the singer.
Larsson was born in Stockholm at the tail end of the 1990s, moving to the suburbs when her younger sister Hanna was born.
She was always singing – showing off to her parents’ dinner-party guests; and serenading “ladies on the subway, when I was like three”.
But she didn’t come from a musical family. Far from it.
“My dad was a military man, working in Navy intelligence,” she says, “so I know he can keep secrets, definitely.”
While the exact nature of his job remains classified, Larsson swears he was the model parent.
“He’s great and he’s funny. You can ask him whatever and he always has the answer. Even if he doesn’t, he will never admit it. So we had a lot of debates and discussions. That’s the reason why I’m interested in everything.
“Now he’s actually studying again – he wants to be a professor in war science.”
Zara’s breakout hit in the UK was Never Forget You – a duet with British producer MNEK that was written in just two hours.
“We work really well together,” she marvels. “It’s just no question marks. I feel very relaxed and honest and open with him. ”
They collaborated again on Ain’t My Fault, a sassy, sexy club track that became Zara’s fifth top 20 hit, late last year.
“We wrote it in five minutes,” says Zara, “Originally, it was about me stealing someone else’s man. I was saying, ‘It ain’t my fault that you’re not cute enough for him.'”
But after submitting the song to her record label, the singer had second thoughts.
“I was just like, ‘Wait, hold up, I can’t sing this’. It just didn’t feel right. It felt like I’d broken the girl code, and I didn’t want to do that.”
As a child, Zara attended the Royal Swedish Ballet School.
“I was very flexible,” she says. “It really taught me a lot about discipline and how to use my body.-BBC
