There’s a gaggle of young artists bringing a new audience to jazz, but no one is doing it with as much pop pizzazz as Laufey. With two albums and a Grammy to her name by the time she was 24, she could have rested on her laurels. Instead the Icelandic-Chinese singer-songwriter, now 26, has taken the time to fall in and out of love, and produce a gorgeous third album full of longing and more than a little feminine ire.
A Matter of Time is pop in its piquant confessional style, underpinned by her classical composition skill, and makes the most of her maturing alto voice with show tune styling. Time is a central theme of the album, obviously. Not just its passing, but the effect that has on relationships and the disorientation of your twenties, feeling like it’s standing still and speeding up all at once.
Lover Girl, one of four singles, is both an earworm and a smart bookend to Falling Behind, a fan favourite from her 2022 debut album Everything I Know About Love. Where Falling Behind saw Laufey bemoan being outpaced by her peers in dating - “Everybody’s falling in love/ And I’m falling behind” - Lover Girl is an arch rejoinder that finally falling in love has its own delicious humiliations. “What a curse it is to be a lover girl,” she sings, using the same bossa nova rhythm to sound relaxed when she’s feeling anything less than chill.
The album cover’s Cinderella styling and storybook chapter-style song titles create a series of fables that play with expectations. Snow White is a deeply romantic ballad about unrealistic beauty standards. Castle in Hollywood is a jaunty earworm about the dislocation of heartbreak. With Carousel, Laufey uses a whirling fairground organ backing track that leaves you wondering if you’re getting anywhere or simply getting motion sickness from being in a holding pattern.
While Laufey keeps her personal life private, there are a handful of juicy breakup songs that are at once incredibly specific and deeply relatable. Taylor Swift herself couldn’t have written a better bridge than the one in Tough Luck, where the ego of a try-hard guy is punctured with some low blows about him cheating on his actress girlfriend. “My accent and music are dumb/Your tattoos are no better, hun,” Laufey spits, and can’t help but itch to know which LA cad this song was written about. (bad tattoos doesn’t exactly narrow it down). Bossa Nova returns for Mr Eclectic, a tart skewering of a pretentious mansplainer.
Love doesn’t have to mean the romantic kind. One of the most gut-wrenching, goosebump-inducing songs is Forget-Me-Not, where Laufey sings in Icelandic as she mourns the self-imposed exile from her home country required to chase her dreams in LA.
This is a no skips album that will leave you humming refrains for days afterwards. I’m prepared to call it now as my album of the year — and not just because of the delightful dream ballet interlude in the middle.
A Matter of Time is out via Vingolf Recording and AWAL on August 22.
