Look who’s laughing now: Benjamin Ingrosso on his journey to becoming Sweden’s greatest showman

On Friday 14 June, Benjamin Ingrosso released his latest single Look Who’s Laughing Now. The acutely self-aware song title ended up being a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Going straight to number one on Spotify Sweden the following day, it gave the artist – who has spent his career having to go the extra mile to prove himself – plenty to smile about.

It’s been a very rewarding few years for Benjamin Ingrosso, with commercial success, critical acclaim and an ever-increasing number of awards to place on his mantle. But 2024 seems to be the year where everything is going stratospheric for the star, and on an international level, too.

Photo: Jonathan Perlmann

Flying high as a Kite

During the spring, Ingrosso completed a 12-city tour of Europe, achieved his first radio smash in Italy with his song Kite (an important achievement for the entertainer, given his half-Italian heritage), and he was selected as one of the interval acts at the 68th Eurovision Song Contest in May, performing a medley of his songs with no less than 20 musicians and dancers joining him on stage.

The Eurovision performance was something of a homecoming for Ingrosso, who had represented Sweden at the 2018 Contest, giving his country a Top 10 finish. This time around, however, he felt it was an even greater buzz, as it enabled him to showcase the artist he’s become six years on: “To be able to be there and do a seven-minute medley, that’s just the best thing. I’m very honoured. Back then I was younger. I’m not a totally different artist now, because the sound of what I was doing with Dance You Off also had the flavour of the old-school world. But now I’m a more evolved performer and artist.”

Photo: Jonathan Perlmann

A career 18 years in the making

Few artists of his age (he will turn 27 in September) could have experienced evolution like Benjamin Ingrosso, who released his first song in 2006, at age eight. He went on to have a stint as a child star in various musical theatre productions before finally embarking on a career as a recording artist professionally in 2016. Looking back over how long it’s taken him to get to the level he’s achieved in 2024, he’s reflective: “I’ve been doing this since I was eight years old, so I know that it takes time. But it also takes the audience a lot of time to connect with an artist and realise what they can do. For me, I had to do it step by step. And now in Sweden, it does feel like people connect with me in a totally different way than they did six years ago.”

For a pop singer, if they ever do cross over into more widespread acclaim, there’s usually a turning point that you can pin it on – a moment that made everyone else sit up and listen. For Ingrosso, he reckons it was the release of his second album, the first album he recorded in Swedish. “En Gång i Tiden was a homage to the old ‘70s music in Sweden. And even the cover art for the album was an homage itself to how Stockholm looked then. It was all very organic. Before, I was ‘the pop guy’, and then all of a sudden people could hear that the way I wrote music was much broader. That made a wider audience connect to me.”

Photo: Jacob Rangnitt

Born under Spotlights

There’s another reason why Benjamin Ingrosso has had to take it step by step in proving himself – and that’s the family he was born into; the celebrity Wahlgren dynasty. In Sweden, they are comparable to the Kardashians in terms of their fame and their impact on pop culture, but that’s where any comparison should end. Behind the Wahlgren family are three generations of award-winning actors, singers, presenters and all-round entertainment stalwarts. Benjamin Ingrosso of course benefitted from the instant platform that comes with this, but he also had to battle the negative side of it, too – no matter what he would go on to achieve, accusations would come from some that it was not down to his talent, but his name.

On his debut album Identification, he wrote a song (Spotlights) about precisely those insecurities, with lyrics such as “You think ’cause I’m a name, I’m a fake, I’m just doing what I’ve been told. See I can understand where they come from ’cause I’ve been on every show.” But surely six years later and a superstar in his own right he isn’t still weighed down by such feelings, is he? “Sometimes. Especially when I’m on stage, there can be some negative thoughts that creep in. I struggle with that a lot, still. On the European tour it was kind of cool to come and see an audience that doesn’t know my family. Some of them have recently found me through Kite, and some of them have been there since Eurovision, and they don’t know my journey in Sweden.”

Back home in Sweden, Benjamin was able to address any naysayers head-on when he participated in Så Mycket Bättre in 2020, one of the biggest TV shows in the country. There, he wrote the lyrics to a song called Tänd Alla Ljus, which poked fun at those preconceived notions of him. “In that song, I was able to speak to an audience that hadn’t heard Spotlights or the Identification album. And in it, I talked about what they all think of me. It was like: ‘I know what you all think. But I have so much more to show’. That song became a big breakthrough for me.”

Photo: Jonathan Perlmann

The Swedish EGOT

It’s a breakthrough that has since led to him winning the Swedish Grammy award for Artist of the Year in 2022, the Kristallen award for TV Personality of the Year (for his cookery programme Benjamin’s) in 2022 and 2023, and multiple Rockbjörnen awards, too. When asked if that means he’s got the Swedish equivalent of an EGOT (the holy grail of award wins in America, where an entertainer can say they’ve won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony). But he informs us that: “As an actor I haven’t won a Guldbaggen, so that’s the last thing for me to win.” And is that something he would potentially pursue? “In the future, 100 per cent. Or as a musical composer for a movie or something.” Then, reminding us of that dynasty, he quips: “My grandma has a Guldbaggen, so maybe I can steal hers.”

This summer, as well as riding on the wave of another number one hit, Benjamin will be heading out on the Better Days tour of Sweden. It follows on from last year’s Allt Det Vackra summer tour, which he cites as another turning point for how people in Sweden perceived him. “When we were doing the first show, people didn’t know what to expect. And then we gave them a full-on pop show. They got to see that I’m more than this one thing and more than that one thing, that I’m an entertainer, which has always been my goal. I’m not an artist with one sound, I’m a performer and an entertainer. And that means that one song I can sit and play on the grand piano and another song I can dance and be more of a…“ Benjamin struggles momentarily to identify what he means in English, so we offer up ‘showman’. “A showman, yes! That’s the right word.” And it truly is.

Photo: Jonathan Perlmann