Zara Larsson celebrates topping Billboard’s TikTok chart with Clean Bandit song due to dolphin meme

"What the fuck is happening"

Zara Larsson has shared her excitement over topping this week’s TikTok Billboard Top 50 chart with Clean Bandit song ‘Symphony’ – which was first released in 2017 – due to a viral dolphin meme on the social media platform.

What’s now called the ‘Symphony’ dolphin meme has caught traction as of late for its simple execution – juxtaposing vibrant illustrations of dolphins with negative or mundane statements by users, all while the uplifting EDM-pop of ‘Symphony’ gives the joke a final kicker.

Larsson happily joined the trend by sharing her own ‘Symphony’ dolphin meme that reads “What the fuck is happening”, along with posting a collection of her favourites from the trend.

“Do you wanna be a part of my SYMPHONY,” she writes, along with an outpour of dolphin, unicorn, and rainbow emojis.

Clean Bandit themselves joined in the trend on the platform, calling the dolphins “inspiring” and asking fans through the meme: “Do you want another song with Zara?”.

‘Symphony’, first released as a Clean Bandit single in 2017, became the lead single for their second album ‘What Is Love?’ in 2018.

Clean Bandit, known for their fusion of EDM and pop with classical music instrumentation, revealed earlier this month that they were pushed by their record label to remove strings from their songs and “told to stop making pop music”.

“There was a push for us to stop having strings in our music,” Chatto told BBC, while Patterson added: “We were told to stop making pop music, as well. We were sent dance music playlists on Spotify and told ‘Your music has to sit on here – only Harry Styles can make pop music’.”

Part of the push they recalled was due to their presence as “shy and unassuming people” rather than as immediately distinctive pop stars. “We were told ‘you don’t have a face, you need to make club music’,” Patterson added, going on to recall how they began to doubt their instincts and later erased the violins for a more house sound.

“We allowed it to happen because we were like, ‘We’d rather release something than nothing’,” Chatto explained. “But the music didn’t feel like our music…In the end, we were like, what’s the point in doing anything?’”

Larsson released her fourth studio album ‘Venus’ in February this year. In an interview with NME promoting the album, she lamented the pressure placed on female pop stars to “reinvent”.

“[Ed Sheeran] has been on his ‘Maths’ journey through his whole career. For pop girls, specifically, it’s like you expect them to reinvent and reinvent and reinvent,” she stressed to NME.

“I don’t think it necessarily means you have to come up with a new side of yourself every time. The right way to do that is to, actually, not find another side, but maybe dig deeper into what you’re doing.”