Laufey is a hugger. Unfazed by how sticky Soho is in a heatwave, iced coffee in hand, she’s buzzing at an interaction with a young fan she had earlier. Her fans, she explains, feel like one big friendship group. “I see a reflection of myself and it just makes me really emotional,” she says. “I struggled to make friends that I could relate to when I was younger. I always felt like I dressed really girly. Now they come to the concerts literally dressed the way I dress.”
At 26, Laufey (pronounced Lay-vay) has already had the music career journey some artists take decades to build. Three albums; more streams of her music than fellow Icelander Björk; those charming and dedicated fans that sell out every single one of her shows. Not to mention a Grammy for her second album, Bewitched, at 24.
The star, whose full name is Laufey Lín Bing Jónsdóttir, has an Icelandic father and a Chinese mother. Born in Iceland, she grew up surrounded by music. “My mom’s a violinist, my grandparents are musicians, so I’ve been playing classical music since I could stand,” she says. Her chosen instrument was the cello, and it was as a cellist that she applied and got into Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. But she’d always loved singing along to the musicals of Hollywood’s golden age and discovered jazz singers whose voices sounded like her own. “I fell in love with Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and Chuck Baker,” she says. “I always had a very low voice, a voice that mimicked the cello.”
She was writing her own songs and getting ready to graduate when the Covid pandemic shut everything down. So she began releasing her music online, building a dedicated audience who related to her biographical lyrics. Her songs are set to a jazz sound that, for Gen Z, is distinctly vintage.
Laufey now has more than nine million followers on Tiktok. Having built a relationship with her audience through a screen makes meeting them in real life a delight. “They feel so real,” she says. “That’s the most shocking thing to me. I never knew if it would translate into human interaction, and it does in a way that is so beyond my expectations.”
“If it’s a mean song, I will never tell them and if they ask, I’ll never admit it.”
Her latest album, A Matter of Time, is an update on her life for the fans. A lot more has happened to her since she released Bewitched, in 2023, and her ironically titled debut album, Everything I Know About Love, the year before that. It included tracks such as I’ve Never Been In Love Before and Falling Behind — a wistful bossa nova track about watching everyone else around you falling in love while you remain alone.
A Matter of Time is about playing catch-up. “These are songs I’ve written about the experiences I’ve had since I put out the last album, and since then I’ve been heartbroken and in love,” she chuckles conspiratorially. “Things move very fast for women, you know how it is.” There are several diss tracks about certain heartbreakers, but their identity will remain a mystery, possibly even to them. “If it’s a nice song, I’ll tell them it’s about them,” she says. “If it’s a mean song, I will never tell them and if they ask, I’ll never admit it.”
It’s a love album, sure, but being in love for the first time in your twenties is a hair-raising experience that most people can relate to, even if they’re not a world-famous artist. “It’s about falling in love, but it’s about how falling in love can be one of the craziest, most anxiety-inducing life lessons,” she says “You learn so much about yourself when you fall in love. That was the most shocking thing that I discovered.”
She also works through the heartache of missing her homeland while loving her current hometown of Los Angeles. “It’s about that immigrant experience and this search for understanding of your identity, how you can move into a new culture while not giving up your last,” she explains. “There’s a dreamlike quality to LA. In Iceland, you’re defined by your family, your past. In LA it feels like you are always the start of the story.” In Iceland, she stuck out for being Asian. “Every single day in LA I see somebody who looks like me,” she says. But Iceland remains her first home and first love.
It was London, however, that provided some key inspiration for A Matter of Time’s fairytale structure and aesthetic, particularly the cover, where Laufey is draped across a giant clock. “I saw a production of Cinderella by the Royal Ballet here in Covent Garden two years ago,” she says. “It was my first time using my big-girl money to buy a big-girl ticket.” She surprised her identical twin Junia, who is also her creative director, with really good seats. “It felt like such an indulgence, but I genuinely haven’t been transported by something on stage like that in such a long time.” Now the lighting designer for that production is doing the lighting for her tour.
As with all genre-bending musicians, it’s hard to describe Laufey’s fresh and distinctive style without being reductive. Word salad about TikTok jazz sensation makes it sound as if her classical training and her study of jazz standards are a fad for the algorithm.
Until a recent wave of younger artists embraced the form, jazz had become a little stuffy. Laufey still finds herself butting up against preconceptions about her youth and gender. “I’ve been grilled by the jazz community for reducing their music,” she says. “It was the pop music of that time. It was the music you’d play on the radio. I just wanted to make it a space for young people, especially, to be able to enjoy it, to keep it alive and interesting.”
Her fanbase of predominately young women and girls is also a factor. “Not to ring that bell, but I’m going to ring it,” she says. “Seeing a young woman make music like that, bringing thousands of young women wearing ribbons in their hair into the concerts screaming that they love jazz. Maybe it feels like an attack of some sort.”
“Thousands of young women wearing ribbons in their hair screaming that they love jazz. Maybe it feels like an attack of some sort”
The kneejerk response has only made her more determined to invite a new generation into spaces such as jazz festivals and concert halls and make them feel comfortable there. “My goal is: my fans come and buy a ticket to come see me, then they go next door and see a jazz quintet and fall in love with it,” she says. “Maybe they’ll come back next week and listen to a Mahler symphony.”
Still, the criticism gets to her sometimes. She was in Nashville for a concert, crying over a particularly nasty review, when her phone rang. It was the Oscar-winning and seven-time Grammy winner Jon Batiste. “He was in Nashville too, and he called to say, can I come to your concert?” she says. “I was mid-cry and he’s like, ‘Are you OK?’ He is such an incredible jazz musician and he was so nice and comforting. He encouraged me to keep doing my thing. He didn’t think that what I was doing was bad or taking away from the art in any way.”
@laufey the best part of tour is crossing over with artist friends in fun cities and hopping on stage last minute ❤️ thank you for such a lovely night @Hozier
♬ original sound - laufey
Batiste is not the only star to back her talent. Barbra Streisand reached out to collaborate on a cover of Laufey’s 2023 song Letter To My 13 Year Old Self. “She is one of the last living legends and the fact that she resonated with this song that I wrote about reaching down to your younger self and telling them you’ll be OK, your dreams will come true … To have Barbra hear that song and resonate is absolutely the craziest thing,” she says. “To get to sing it with her, to have that written into my history, I feel so honoured.”
That’s a hard collaboration to top, but Laufey says she has plenty more artists on her wishlist. “I’d love to collaborate with Hozier,” she says. “I just sang with him in Brazil randomly because we were both in São Paulo at the same time. I asked him for tickets to go see the concert and he said, ‘Do you want to come on stage for a song?’”
Like Hozier, Laufey is determined to recognise the central importance of black artists in the genre she works in. “Jazz was created out of breaking from the rules,” she says. “It’s a black art form.” It’s that disregard for rules that has encouraged her to defend blending jazz and pop. “I wouldn’t even have spoken about this a year ago, but I think for the first time with this album, music is music. It doesn’t exist in brackets,” she says. “No artist I ever looked up to just sat in the comfort of what existed before. They’ve always pushed the needle.”
A Matter of Time is out now via Vingolf Recording and AWAL; laufeymusic.com/tour
