Zara Larsson’s all-female remix album expands ‘Midnight Sun’ into something bigger, bolder, and harder to dismiss. Here’s our full review
Zara Larsson has spent the better part of a decade being correct about herself. The Swedish singer who won a talent competition at age ten, who scored a Nordic No. 1 with 2013’s “Uncover” before most Americans had mapped her onto their cultural radar, who kept resetting the clock rather than releasing work she didn’t believe in, has always operated with a long-game precision that the industry rarely rewards until it suddenly has no choice.
That moment arrived in full with Midnight Sun, her fifth studio album, released last September to near-universal critical acclaim and a Metacritic score of 89. Now, with Midnight Sun: Girls Trip, dropped May 1 via Sommer House and Epic Records, she has done something more audacious than simply expanding the tracklist. She has handed every song over to a rotating cast of thirteen women and non-binary artists, dared each collaborator to do actual damage, and mostly gotten exactly what she asked for. The remix album as a contemporary art form has a credibility problem.
Too often it is a contractual obligation wearing a party dress, a collection of added verses and unchanged choruses designed to extend a streaming cycle without extending any ideas. Charli XCX‘s Brat remix era recalibrated those expectations significantly, and Larsson has been open about drawing inspiration from it. At an iHeartRadio listening party in Los Angeles the night before Girls Trip dropped, she credited both Charli and PinkPantheress for demonstrating that a great song “can kind of be anything.” That philosophy is audible throughout the record.
When PinkPantheress Rewires the Title Track
The album’s thesis statement arrives immediately. PinkPantheress’s reconstruction of “Midnight Sun“ accelerates the original to something close to hyperdrive, wobbling video-game synths pressing against Larsson’s vocals until the song feels less like a memory of summer and more like the anxious, beautiful anticipation of it. It is a legitimately different object than what appeared on the original album, and it debuts as the new canonical version. That willingness to let a collaborator fully overwrite the premise is exactly what distinguishes Girls Trip from the kind of deluxe project you forget three weeks after its release.
Not every remix earns that level of transformation. The “Hot and Sexy“ feature with Tyla stays close to the original’s bubblegum-bass structure, adding a verse without meaningfully destabilizing the song’s architecture. “Puss Puss“ with Robyn is perhaps the most intriguing concept on paper and the most unresolved in practice, Robyn’s signature dry-ice cool working against the track’s momentum rather than redirecting it. These are the project’s minor failures, and they are honest ones.
The successes are worth lingering on. Shakira‘s addition to “Eurosummer“ is everything you could reasonably want, her verse injecting South American flair and genuine heat into a song that already understood what summer meant. “Blue Moon“ with Kehlani lets R&B’s emotional logic quietly restructure a track that previously held its feelings at arm’s length. The “Pretty Ugly“ remix featuring JT and Margo XS is, by Larsson’s own admission, the version she prefers to the original, and it is easy to hear why: the trio’s energy lands as exhilaration rather than performance.
A Decade in the Making, Finally on Her Own Terms
Girls Trip arrives at a specific, legible moment in Larsson’s career. In the months preceding this release, she performed “Midnight Sun” during PinkPantheress’s Coachella set, opened for Tate McRae on the Miss Possessive arena tour, earned her first Grammy nomination for best dance pop recording, and watched her collaboration with PinkPantheress, “Stateside,” climb to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and top the Billboard Global 200. Then, on April 29, she accepted Billboard’s Women in Music Breakthrough Award, presented to her by Tyla, a full decade after her first Hot 100 entry.
The day after that ceremony, she previewed Girls Trip for fans at the iHeartRadio Theater in Los Angeles. Two days later, the album was in the world. That accumulation of momentum matters to understanding what Girls Trip actually is. This is not a corrective record from an artist scrambling for commercial purchase. It is a record from an artist who has stabilized, who described making Midnight Sun as working with friends whose cultural references are so similar that confidence came naturally, and who now has the leverage to pull Shakira into her universe rather than audition for someone else’s.
The Dionne Warwick endorsement, the dolphin-meme music video, the decade of “Lush Life” choreography passed between fans, the unapologetic political clarity: all of it has cohered into something the Danish music industry observer who told Pitchfork last weekend had it right about, even if he couldn’t name the songs. Zara Larsson is a classic. Girls Trip is her making sure the catalog catches up.
