Album Review: Poster Girl by Zara Larsson

There's scarcely been a time when Zara Larsson wasn't famous. First reaching television screens in her native Sweden as a precocious 10 year old, it took second album 'So Good' to push her to an international level. Broadly speaking, she's grown up in the public eye, yet she owns this - her mistakes are her mistakes, and her achievements are her achievements.

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With her 2017 album So Good, Sweden’s Zara Larsson epitomised pure pop: collaborations with the biggest names in the industry, production that veered from the lovelorn ballad to the sunny party anthem, and a formidable voice to sell it. Flash-forward four years and Poster Girl is released in a different environment. It's certainly more disco-influenced (thank Dua Lipa for that) but the whole aesthetic is also more experimental and multi-layered.

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But within Poster Girl's glitterball lustre, it's her dealing with the various strings of love that offers vibrancy. You can hear it glimmer in the opening, low pitched synths of "Love Me Land," a synthetic gleam of hope in romantic love, and beyond. Poster Girl's thematic through line is a welcome change from Larsson's 2017 So Good, which had its fair share of pop bangers (including the now-platinum singles "Lush Life" and "Never Forget You" with MNEK ) but struggled cohesively.

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Zara Larsson makes breezy, digestible electro-pop: all shine, but no substance. She found her niche in the years after EDM crept into pop, crooning over bright, sanitized synths on her 2015 breakout track "Lush Life" and sighing over wobbling bass on Kygo and Clean Bandit tracks, her voice reduced to a murmur. On her third album, Poster Girl, Larsson attempts to incorporate Dua Lipa-style disco, with stabs at the kind of retro gloss that filled Lady Gaga and The Weeknd's albums last year.

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