Gary Grimes examines the niche memes and noughties tech-optimism behind Zara Larsson’s visual world

“Summer isn’t over yet!’ Swedish pop princess Zara Larsson can be seen proudly declaring to a crowd of screaming fans at Belgium’s Pukkelpop festival. In a clip which has since gone viral, the star can be observed becoming visibly moved on stage by the sight of more and more members of the crowd being hoisted above the heads of their peers in a dolphin-like formation in what is a nod to a meme which first came to prominence over two years ago and would go on to determine the visual world of the singer’s fourth album Midnight Sun – and indeed her career writ large ever since.

First started by TikTok user @heiratet, the meme in question was simple in essence: it features childlike drawings of dolphins leaping through an impossibly blue sky, offset by a backdrop of vivid rainbows and beneath them an ocean filled with an array of dazzling, multicoloured fish. The various iterations of the meme evoke a childlike sense of fun, reminiscent of the stickers and school-supplies brand Lisa Frank or the aquatic imagery of Hawaiian painter Christian Riese Lassen. Soundtracked by the soaring chorus of Zara’s 2018 collaboration with Clean Bandit Symphony, these enchanting landscapes are juxtaposed by their dark, sardonic captions which typically read something, quite simply, like: ‘I am mentally unstable.’

“Often, such trends come and go without the artist in question even directly engaging.”

Gary Grimes

Before long these humourous, if slightly sinister, memes were growing in traction, with posts often acquiring over a million likes. A very happy byproduct of this for Miss Larsson was the resulting spike in streams Symphony enjoyed, as it became lodged in the brains of TikTok users who kept being fed the meme. An even better result perhaps came from the design inspiration the phenomenon offered the star as she readied the visuals for Midnight Sun. Often, such trends come and go without the artist in question even directly engaging. Zara has admitted that not only was she paying attention to these sun-soaked, irony-drenched images, they directly informed the visual direction of her next project.

In the music video for the album’s second single, similarly titled Midnight Sun, director Charlotte Rutherford places the suitably sunkissed starlet emerging from a sparkling ocean, crawling on water (à la Madonna’s Love Profusion), and cavorting and splashing in front of hyperreal, oversaturated paradise skies complete with pink and orange clouds. Later in the video, as she writhes around in plush, electric green grass, she is accompanied by iridescent animated butterflies, hearts, and, of course, dolphins. Also visible is text reading words like ‘believe’ and ‘abundance’ which flash on-screen in stretched and shadowed fonts, a nod to the ironic “positive affirmations” accounts which surely inspired the original dolphin Symphony meme.

“What evokes the sound of a Eurosummer better than the iconic Jason Brooks-designed artworks that used to cover Ministry of Sound’s Hedkandi dance music compilations?”

Gary Grimes

Zara’s meeting of the moment was taken a step further when she engaged the actual Lisa Frank brand to design an alternate cover for a special limited-edition CD release of the album. In a collaboration the brand labelled ‘pop star meets pop art’ the stationary producer reimagined the Midnight Sun album cover as “an underwater dreamscape filled with dolphins, flowers, and neon magic.”

Beyond employing the meme’s signature children’s storybook aesthetics however, she’s also drawn inspiration from the album’s broader theme of unending summer. And what evokes the sound of a Eurosummer better than the iconic Jason Brooks-designed artworks that used to cover Ministry of Sound’s Hedkandi dance music compilations? It made perfect sense then for the artist to tap Brooks to design the artwork for the Muni Long remix of Midnight Sun, an illustration of Zara and Muni, each sporting a single tropical flower in their hair (another recurring motif of the era) which immediately conjures mental images of sundowners in Ibiza in the mid 2000s.

Elsewhere, the iconography of strolls down the Jersey Shore boardwalk are represented through the singer’s baby t-shirts worn in the video which sport a spraypainted design which frames the words ‘connected’ and ‘sunkissed’ between silhouettes of palm trees, graffiti-esque cherries and hearts, and Rip Curl waves. Surf culture in fact was a major reference for parts of Zara’s world, as noted by S1m0nc3ll0, the VFX artist who worked on both the music videos for Midnight Sun and Zara’s PinkPantheress collaboration Stateside, and previously voiced that classic surf brands like Roxy, Rip Curl and Quicksilver were influential to him whilst working on the videos.

“The singer’s mastering of this joyful, nostalgic design world has hit all the right buttons for a generation of internet-grown kids.”

Gary Grimes

Aside from the internet and meme culture of which Zara is a native, the world of Midnight Sun also intersects with a number of prominent design languages which have grown in popularity in recent years, most notably that of Frutiger Aero, a style which draws from the work of typeface designer Adrian Frutiger and the dreamy screensavers and design language of Windows Vista and Windows 7 computers in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The Midnight Sun visuals, from its video to its more recent tour montages include many of the hallmarks of this style, such as crystal clear globules of water and shocking green grass, relying on the nostalgia of Gen Z’s early internet experiences to evoke a feeling of both tech-optimism and childlike wonder. Similarly, the music video for subsequent single Crush uses video game-style visuals reminiscent of The Sims, placing a blonde Zara character running between computerised palm trees.

As the singer’s Midnight Sun era shows no signs of slowing down, neither do Zara’s canny collaboration with brands who share her effervescent, child friendly aesthetics, as evidenced by a recent collaboration with the classic children’s animated series Winx Club which see the star transformed into a cartoon fairy sporting butterfly-style fairy wings (whilst still in her trademark Midnight Sun graffiti baby tees) for a special music video which will also feature in an episode of the Rainbow-produced series. In what is surely a relief to fans of both pop perfection and summer sunshine, it would seem summer really isn’t over yet for the star. The singer’s mastering of this joyful, nostalgic design world has hit all the right buttons for a generation of internet-grown kids who, on the decidedly colder streets of today’s virtual landscape, need more than ever to feel the warm glow of a neverending midnight sun on their cheeks.