Zara Larsson and PinkPantheress Run It Back on the “Midnight Sun” Remix

Not long ago, Zara Larsson’s U.S. story looked stalled: a teenage breakout in 2015, then years of solid releases that rarely translated into real chart momentum stateside. That arc has changed fast. Over the past year, Larsson has moved from legacy-hit nostalgia to something closer to a second act, and she’s been unusually sharp about turning internet chaos into strategy.

The pivot started in an unlikely place. In 2024, TikTok turned Clean Bandit and Larsson’s Symphony into the soundtrack for a wave of melancholy dolphin memes—Lisa Frank colors, existential captions, and all. Instead of resisting it, Larsson leaned in. By the time she released Midnight Sun, created with longtime collaborator MNEK, she was already reframing the joke as branding. The title-track video folded in the dolphin imagery directly, and her run opening for Tate McRae only amplified the shift. By tour’s end, chatter around Larsson’s set was often louder than expected for an opener.

Her chemistry with PinkPantheress helped push that momentum into the mainstream. The two linked on a remix of Stateside for Larsson’s expanded project Fancy Some More?, and the song picked up another life after Alysa Liu used it at the Olympic Exhibition Gala. It climbed to No. 6 in the U.S., Larsson’s biggest American peak to date, and helped trigger a broader catalog rebound. This week alone, she has four Hot 100 entries: Stateside, Midnight Sun, the revived Lush Life, and the new Tyla collaboration She Did It Again.

Now Larsson has gone all the way with Midnight Sun: Girls Trip, a full remix edition with guests on every track, in the same collaborative-pop lane that artists like Charli XCX and PinkPantheress have normalized. The cast is stacked—Tyla, Shakira, Kehlani, and, notably, Robyn on Puss Puss—but the headline grab is clearly PinkPantheress returning for a new version of Midnight Sun.

That remix makes a hard stylistic turn: jittery jungle breaks, low-end blurts, and a busier mix that intentionally roughs up the original’s cleaner glide. It’s energetic, but crowded, and whether it overtakes the album cut will depend on how listeners respond to that density. Even so, the collaboration matters less as a novelty and more as proof of Larsson’s current position: she’s no longer trying to recover old momentum, she’s operating inside the meme-to-chart pipeline in real time, with collaborators who understand exactly how that ecosystem works.

Midnight Sun: Girls Trip is out now via Epic.