One mark of whether someone has the boldness to be a good pop star is how they respond to overhearing someone slagging them off. A few weeks ago, the Icelandic-Chinese jazz-pop phenomenon Laufey was at a coffee shop close to her Los Angeles home when her ears pricked up at the mention of her name (it’s pronounced “Lay-vay”, by the way). “I used to love her,” a young woman told her friends. “I’ve met her and she’s so sweet, but her music is unlistenable now.”
In that split-second, Laufey realised that she could do the Normal Person Thing (slink away unnoticed and furiously text her group chat), or do the Pop Star Thing. She spun around to face the group. “I’m so sorry,” Laufey said, her voice dripping with honeyed sarcasm. “I try my best.”
The thought of being confronted by a celebrity you are gossiping about is enough to send most of us into an early grave, and I nervously laugh as Laufey tells me the story one morning in New York. She laughs too, perhaps a little shocked by her ballsiness. “I wasn’t even trying to clap back,” she says. “They didn’t know what to say, they were so dumbfounded.”
This goes against much of what I thought I knew about Laufey. The 26-year-old has drawn an obsessive fanbase for winsome love songs that marry her jazz and classical training with sticky pop hooks. Her music is a giddy tumble into a retro-modern world of soft teen romance, with aurora skies, sunset kisses and crushes who leave you on “read”. It surges with the big feelings of modern young womanhood, swaddling them in tulle and sending them airborne amid cascading orchestration.
Over the peppy bossa nova of her breakout, TikTok-buoyed hit From the Start, she comes across as an Austen heroine who speaks internet, tortured by the “burning pain” of listening to a crush “blah blah blah”-ing interminably about a new partner. Her fans, often young women, are drawn into Laufey-land by her big-sister energy: an edition of her 2023 album Bewitched came with a themed board game. At first glance, with her retro jazz-influenced sound, you might not peg Laufey as the most likely superstar, one who has racked up nearly 5bn Spotify streams and a string of sellout shows across the world. But you could also see her music as a lighter and more literal take on the vintage-hued introspection that has made Lana Del Rey and Billie Eilish stadium-fillers around the globe.
Now Laufey is keen to rough up her reputation as gen-Z’s favourite jazz savant, at least a little. Her new album A Matter of Time splits the difference between sugar-plum symphonics with imperfect notes and vocals that crack with emotion. One song has jolting strings that she compares to a scream. “I wanted to make more of a statement on this album,” she says. “I’ve become known as a bit of a soft singer. I am that, but I also want to show parts of myself that aren’t that pretty.”
She arrived in the hotel lobby this morning on time and as neat as a pin, with a cardigan-wearing bunny rabbit dangling from her handbag. (The critter, named Mei Mei, is Laufey’s mascot and alias of sorts – she releases alternative versions of her songs under its name, and it is also available to buy, with a portion of the proceeds aiding music education as part of the Laufey Foundation.) “Do you want to go in there?” she asks, leading me into a side room and getting out the best biscuits: “It’s the guests-only lounge.” The place is done up like a hunting lodge, with artfully oxidised mirrors, a wall-mounted antelope head and, most bizarrely, given that it is summer, a burning log fire. When I comment on the strangeness, Laufey says, wryly: “Well, it’s now reached a very cool 24 degrees.”
After beating Bruce Springsteen to take home the 2024 Grammy award for best traditional pop vocal album, Laufey’s career has gone into overdrive. She’s now a fashion week fixture, trading air kisses with Naomi Campbell on the front row of the Chanel show in July, and has celebrity pals in Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan, PinkPantheress and the indie sensation Clairo, whom she recently challenged to a spicy chicken wing-eating contest on a Hot Ones episode. She has won over industry legends: earlier this year, she duetted with Barbra Streisand on a heartfelt cover of her song Letter to My 13 Year Old Self. “It’s beautiful to see a young artist inspired by jazz greats like Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday make such a deep connection with her fans,” said Streisand. This autumn, Laufey will embark on her first arena tour, with two nights at Madison Square Garden.
She says she was driven by a “hunger” to imbue the new experiences of a whirlwind few years into her new album. It radiates a sense of adventure, dovetailing between twangy campfire country to swoony ballads and sherbert-spiked pop. The record is produced by Laufey and longtime collaborator Spencer Stewart: between them, they can play just about any instrument you have heard of, as well as some you may not have. I was unfamiliar with the celesta, an obscure kind of idiophone that Stewart and Laufey play on the record (it sounds like a child’s musical jewellery box). On the Busby Berkeley-worthy confection Lover Girl, she knowingly leans into her Cupid-struck image, while on Carousel, Laufey reckons with inviting a partner into her circus-like life while a seasick accordion plays. The rapturous Forget-Me-Not, recorded with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra (for which she was a teenage cello soloist), is her most accomplished work of composition to date; her voice soars among flurries of flutes.
“I wanted the album to reflect all sides of my emotional scale,” she says, huddling in air-con that has apparently been set to “Himalayan”. “Within one day, I will have a happy hour and a crying hour. I have no interest in making an album that’s one vibe throughout.” But there is, she says, an emotional through-line about learning to accept yourself while falling in love with someone else. She won’t talk about her relationship status today though, and I ask if internet scrutiny makes it hard to write candidly about her dating experiences. “There’s always a line of ambiguity,” Laufey says, before smiling mischievously. “But if you get into a situation with me, you kind of know that I might write about it.”
There’s a playful looseness to Laufey that suggests she has settled into her success. She says that hasn’t always been easy. After her Grammy win, she struggled to balance the new attention with a punishing touring schedule. “I was a little bit scared,” she says. “I had a more shocking kind of success than I thought I would ever have. With the flurry of it all, it got a bit hard for me to keep up mentally.” It wasn’t just the shows; it was that being a pop star means being a piñata for online opinion. “It was the battle of seeing a bad photo of yourself online, or hearing bad comments about yourself,” she says. “It was tough.”
Laufey Lín Bing Jónsdóttir always knew what it meant to work. She was born in Reykjavík to a mother who is a professional violinist for the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, with maternal grandparents who are music professors. Aged four, Laufey began piano lessons, then added cello lessons at eight, cramming schoolwork around a dizzying schedule of rehearsals and performances. She credits that relentless regimen with giving her the strength – vocal, mental and muscular – to play for extended periods. When we meet, she’s in the middle of a six-date summer run of orchestral shows across the eastern United States.
After an early brush with the spotlight as a finalist in Ísland (Iceland) Got Talent in 2014, Laufey won a scholarship to the prestigious Berklee School of Music in Boston, and began posting performances of jazz standards from her dorm room. In 2021, she released her debut EP, Typical of Me, which drew from the music of 20th-century Tin Pan Alley and found fans in Billie Eilish and Willow Smith.
A Matter of Time marks her creative world opening up. Two spry new songs were created with Taylor Swift collaborator and the National founder member Aaron Dessner at his Long Pond Studios, in an experience that Laufey says “opened a third musical eye”. And she is more lighthearted than ever on Mr Eclectic, a bossa nova-inspired track featuring Clairo that pokes fun at men who mansplain classical music to her. “I just think it’s funny to be the type of man who performatively reads a beaten-up paperback outside a coffee shop,” she says, her nose wrinkling. “I’ve dated guys like that, but this is a forever type of man. Why do you think all philosophers are men? They just had the platform and the audacity.”
Laufey’s spicy side makes me like her a whole lot more, not least because it feels refreshing after years of interviewing media-trained artists who won’t tell you their favourite colour in case it conflicts with their Dulux brand deal. That candour can also be seen in A Matter of Time’s waltzing Snow White, which addresses what she calls her lifelong struggle with body image and identity. In the video, set amid the jaw-dropping Icelandic tundra, she sings, “I don’t think I’m pretty, it’s not up for debate,” into a mirror while pulling at the side of her left eye to emphasise its shape.
Today, she feels that her insecurity about her looks is as under control as anyone’s. (“We all have our moments,” she says.) She enjoys fashion, and attended the Met Gala last year wearing a custom veil featuring the notation of a favourite Bach classical piece. She can’t remember which violin fugue it was in the moment and pulls up the Spotify app on her phone. “It was this,” she says, as a delicate composition tinnily plays. “But it’s on guitar for some reason.” That won’t do. “Come on, violin!” she whoops, scrolling on.
Laufey hopes that someone will be doing the same thing with her music a few centuries from now. “I think often about how artists in the past were not led by external sources,” she says. “Ella Fitzgerald wasn’t putting a 20-second clip of her new song out and having people read it to filth. I try so hard to not let [social media] shape my art.”
I wonder if that’s a challenge, given that social media has helped to power her fairytale rise since the very beginning. “Honestly” – her voice drops to a whisper – “I love it. I literally have a career because an audience on social media showed me there was a space for the type of music I make. I know that if I had gone to a label six years ago and said: ‘I’m going to make music that’s a mix of jazz and classical and about my own experiences, and I’m gonna play arenas one day,’ they would have said, ‘Bullshit.’ They would not have put a dollar down on my name.
“I don’t know what miracle happened that I get to have this career,” she says. She’s determined to make every moment of it count. She drains the last of her iced coffee and heads off to a fitting for her upcoming tour. After that, she’ll go to Electric Lady Studios to work on more music – no matter that her new album isn’t even out on the day we speak. She jumps into a car with blacked-out windows, nattering away to her assistant in Icelandic. I can’t understand what she is saying, but it sounds like Laufey is planning her next move.
A Matter of Time is out now.
