Benjamin Ingrosso grew up inside one of Sweden's most televised families, and on "mommy's boy," the first of four songs he released Friday (Oct 16), he writes the unflattering profile himself. The track opens baby don't say that, I'm sensitive, a 13-song album due March 19, 2027, through EMI Nordic. It also lands one week before the singer starts the first arena tour of his career.
"'mommy's boy' is a kind of confession, where I poke fun at a self-image that doesn't match reality," Ingrosso said in announcing the album. "It's about someone who comes across as confident and perhaps a little vain, but deep down struggles with low self-esteem and just wants to be chosen and feel validated."
The title points straight back at his own house. His mother is the singer and actress Pernilla Wahlgren, his sister is the media personality Bianca Ingrosso, and his cousin is Sebastian Ingrosso of Swedish House Mafia. Much of the family's life has played out on the reality series Wahlgrens värld. Benjamin has largely stepped away from the show in recent years and put his time into the records instead.
The other three new songs work the same ground from different sides. On "nice to meet ya," he sits in the uneasy stretch where he is finally getting over someone while some irrational part of him still refuses to move on. "deep diver" takes its title literally, and "cliché" keeps circling the question of whether doing anything differently would have saved a relationship.
Those four join "funny feeling" and "waste my time," the double single he released Sept 18 as his first new music in two years. That puts six of the album's 13 tracks in public hands. The full sequence, published Friday, opens with "mommy's boy" and "waste my time," parks "funny feeling" in the seventh slot and closes on "go down." Six titles remain unheard until March: "what girls want," "blue jeans and strawberries," "crazy stupid," "flightmode," "walk out of heaven" and "end of the world."
Pink Velvet Theatre, the 2024 concept record he built with Salem Al-Fakir and Vincent Pontare, borrowed from the Bee Gees, Queen, Elton John and the staging of big-screen musicals. The new material turns toward '80s new wave and the alternative pop and indie that ruled the turn of the millennium. The four latest songs also lean harder on a live band than September's pair did, with more of the weight resting on the groove.
The hiring sheet reflects that shift. Jonathan Rado, whose credits include Miley Cyrus, The Killers and Father John Misty, produced alongside Kane Ritchotte, who has worked with sombr, Phoebe Bridgers and Role Model. On bass is Pino Palladino, whose résumé runs through Elton John, John Mayer and The Who. The keyboard chair belongs to Greg Phillinganes, who has played for Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson and Aretha Franklin.
For decades the pop trade has flowed west out of Stockholm, with Swedish songwriters and producers shaping American radio hits from studios at home. Ingrosso has run that route in reverse. He brought a bassist from Elton John's records and a keyboardist from Michael Jackson's into a breakup album released on a Nordic label, written by a man who put out his first single at nine.
He has been as unguarded talking about the songs as he is inside them. In an interview with the Swedish broadcaster TV4, Ingrosso traced several of the new tracks to his own love life and said he had let himself be far more outspoken this time. "I sing a lot about sex on this record, precisely because I was in a relationship that was the most passionate I've ever been in, but also very destructive," he said in Swedish. He added that getting older has changed the way he writes about love.
The pressure on the follow-up comes from how well the last one went. Pink Velvet Theatre carried him to a clean sweep at P3 Guld in January 2025, the Swedish Radio awards voted largely by listeners. He won all four categories he was nominated in, including artist of the year, album of the year, song of the year for "Kite" and the Guldmicken live prize.
Two months later came the Grammis, Sweden's equivalent of the Grammys. There he took artist of the year and album of the year, plus song of the year for "Honey Boy," his collaboration with Purple Disco Machine featuring Nile Rodgers and Shenseea.
"All my life I've dreamed of being accepted for my music," he told TV4 Nyheterna after the ceremony. He recalled feeling a little ashamed when he accepted the same artist prize three years earlier, because he did not think he had earned it then.
The same tension runs through This Is Benjamin, the three-part documentary that followed the most intense year of his career. The series set his euphoric highs beside his struggles with self-loathing and the grind of his first U.S. headline tour in early 2025. That was the same stretch in which the trophies were piling up at home.
The live résumé was already heavy before the arenas. His Allt det vackra tour in 2023 and Better Days tour in 2024 both sold out across Sweden, and he played Finland's Ruisrock festival in the summer of 2025.
The What Happens Next? Tour opens Friday (Oct 23) with a sold-out show in Karlstad. From there it moves through Sweden, Finland and Norway, including a stop at Helsinki's Veikkaus Arena on Oct 28. The run closes with two nights at Stockholm's Avicii Arena on Nov 13 and 14.
All of it traces back to 2018, when he won Melodifestivalen and finished seventh for Sweden at Eurovision in Lisbon with "Dance You Off." His debut album, Identification, followed that fall. A breakout turn on Så Mycket Bättre came in 2020. Three seasons of Benjamins followed, the series that brought some of Sweden's biggest artists into his kitchen to perform, along with the Swedish-language album En gång i tiden.
When the doors open in Karlstad on Friday, the crowd will have had exactly one week to learn "mommy's boy" and the three songs that arrived with it.
