Midnight Sun

Zara Larsson recorded Midnight Sun at the Muzo studios in Stockholm, but the song didn’t begin between four walls. The idea came from a personal obsession: capturing that moment when Swedish summer refuses to end, when the sun stays glued to the sky and the day stretches like a sigh. Larsson put it this way: she wanted the entire album — and this track in particular — to sound like a June night that never fades, no matter if it’s December outside. The result is a song that pulses between the electric and the organic, where the breakbeats of drum and bass collide with the ethereal synthesizers of electropop and the heavy bass of Jersey club, all wrapped in a production that smells of hot asphalt and neon lights.The recording wasn’t a cold process: the team led by Juanita Manrique, Joel Quatrocchi, and Kaelen Russell — with Tom Norris at the helm of the mix — let the rhythms feel alive, almost as if the song breathed between takes.

The songwriters Helena Gao, MNEK, and Larsson herself wove lyrics that paint images of endless roads and nights that never end, while the producers Margo XS, MNEK, and Troy Taylor gave it that artificial yet warm glow that makes Midnight Sun sound like both a party anthem and a pang of nostalgia at once. At 3:11 long, the track doesn’t stand still: it rises and falls through layers of sound, as if designed to play on an outdoor speaker when the sun barely grazes the horizon.