Gen-Z’s jazz star gets messy: Laufey on her third album ‘A Matter of Time’

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Laufey has been busy. No, not touring or recording, not sitting front row at Paris Fashion Week or filming a music video – though those are all things she’s known to do. Having become a viral sensation for her confessional-pop leaning jazz tunes, the 26-year-old Icelandic-Chinese artist (she was born and raised in Reykjavík) boasts two beloved studio albums (with a third on the way), tens of millions of streams and even a Grammy for Traditional Pop Vocal Album. She’s commanded stages from Coachella to the Philippines, played (and recorded) with orchestras and started a beloved book club. Today, though, she’s concerned with one of the more mundane acts associated with being a superstar musician: signing records. She’s signed 27,000 in the last two weeks, sitting hours at a time as YouTube or a movie drones on in the background (this week she’s ramped up her output, signing “like, all day”).

“It’s been a lot of writing my name and staring at a picture of myself, so I’m very happy to be across that border,” says Laufey. She’s sitting in her dining room in Los Angeles, surrounded by the fruits of her labour: boxes upon boxes of freshly signed records. “I really wanted to make sure that I was the one signing every single one and you could feel the human in them. Sometimes I signed it really, really badly and then I’d just write, ‘Oops, sorry’.” She’d finish off these happy accidents with a flurry of hearts.

Of course she signs her own records. Ever since Laufey, born Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir, began uploading her singing videos to TikTok and Instagram – a pandemic side quest, embarked upon after her classes at the prestigious Berklee College of Music were put on hiatus – the adjective she’s embodied best has been “authentic”. She’s a classically trained instrumentalist. She writes her own songs, plucked from her own experiences. She has an aesthetic – one marked with bows and poufs and Mary Jane flats – she’s been true to since her youth. When I reach her on Zoom, it’s 10am and she’s wearing a Sleeper nap dress with lace trim and puffy sleeves, decorated with teeny tiny florals, face makeup-free and hair in its natural tousled waves. “I look really dressed up but I’m not wearing any underwear,” she says, true to her charming TMI nature.

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She brings that very authenticity to the record in question. And while we’ve heard Laufey speak of love and heartbreak, of melancholy and joy with extraordinary candour, we’ve never quite heard her like this. With A Matter of Time, her third studio album, Laufey gets messy. “I’ve always been this poised person – or at least aware of who I am projecting onto my audience and projecting onto the world,” she says. “You want to look put together, you want to seem like your emotions are intact. That your range of emotions doesn’t go much further than a sad day or a happy day. But in reality it’s so much more than that. It stretches much further past sadness into anger and rage and anxiety. And there are so many layers to being happy and in love as well. I really wanted to delve into the range of female emotion on this album.”

This willingness to embrace these nuances and extremes clicked into place somewhere along the album-making process. At a critical turning point, Laufey simply stopped “chasing beauty”. “Women – and women in the spotlight, especially – give themselves the pressure to appear very beautiful,” she says. “That’s what I’ve been chasing my whole life.

She means aesthetically, yes, but also musically. To study classical music is to seek literal perfection and Laufey has been doing just that since childhood. “The standard of perfection already exists and you’re trying everything to get there,” she says. “You practise and you practise, you play harder scales and harder pieces, you do competitions – it’s very linear.” Growing up in Reykjavík the daughter of an accomplished violinist (her mother, who picked up the instrument in her native Guangzhou, China), she began studying piano at four and cello at eight. By 15, she was performing cello solos with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Also around that time, she reached the finals of Ísland Got Talent and the semi-finals of The Voice Iceland.

Leaning into contemporary music, however, disrupted that search for perfection. The genre most closely associated with Laufey is jazz, one characterised by the freewheeling and unexpected. In fact, bombastic statements declaring her the genre’s saviour have been known to appear in magazines not unlike this one. And though Laufey certainly can do (and has done) jazz in its purest form (“I’ve studied jazz music to its core”), that’s distinctly not what she’s doing with A Matter of Time. “It’s been a really fun journey finding the confidence to make whatever music I want,” she says. “People are trying really hard to put me in a box, because I’ve never fit into one box. Not physically, not identity-wise, either. I’ve never been fully one thing.”

She has a point. Just as Laufey is both Icelandic and Chinese (not to mention somewhat culturally American; her Icelandic father works for the International Monetary Fund and Laufey and her twin sister, Junia, spent part of their childhood in Washington DC), she’s also simultaneously jazz and pop and classical and singer singer-songwriter and everything in between. “People try to put me in a corner and define me, and I just don’t think I can be defined at all,” she says. “I’m such a mishmash of many different things, and the music that I make is entirely my genre now.”

Why has Laufey’s willingness to let go – to welcome imperfection and just be herself – come now, a few years into her career? “Maybe my frontal lobe developed – I turned 26,” she laughs, referring to the age at which the part of the brain associated with planning and self-control fully forms. “But I just realised my worth was no longer measured in beauty.” To double down on that notion, for the album cover, which was shot by renowned photographer Emma Summerton, Laufey wears her natural curly hair in lieu of the soft blowout we’ve seen in the past. It's a stark contrast to the editorial look in this story, in which she wears ethereal make-up – periwinkle shadow, glossy pink lips – crafted by Peter Philips, the celebrated Creative and Image Director of Dior Beauty.

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The only people who don’t seem to care what genre Laufey exists within are her fans: the Lauvers. They show up at her concerts in lace and bows, ready to embrace her artistry. They also know exactly how to pronounce her name. Not since Saoirse Ronan has there been a famous person’s name so utterly mispronounced (it’s Lay-vay, for the uninitiated). “Of course no one knows how to pronounce my name, and it’s funny because it’s such a normal name in Iceland,” says Laufey, noting that the name comes from Norse mythology. “I’m named after my great-grandmother and my cousin is called Laufey, my aunt is called Laufey. It’s just a name that’s in the family.”

Don’t worry – she’s in on the joke. Ahead of Coachella this year, at which Laufey made a surprise appearance, a billboard popped up along the I-10 highway on the way to the festival grounds that read in lo-fi, internet-friendly font: “Still struggling to say my name? Visit SayLaufey.com to learn”. She and Junia came up with it together, amused by the juxtaposition of the “shitty edit” and the huge, very professional-looking billboard.

The website, which, at the time of writing, is still live, features a clip from The Graham Norton Show of Timothée Chalamet, Andrew Garfield and Coleman Domingo trying (not very successfully) to say her name. “I kind of poke fun at it, right? I still think 90 percent of the world still thinks I’m called ‘Loffy’, and that’s OK,” she says. “I always say I would much rather you call me ‘Loffy’ than nothing at all.”

Laufey isn’t the first undefinable artist to come out of Iceland (we’re looking at you, Björk). For an island nation with under 400,000 inhabitants, there seems to be a disproportionate number of creatives who break through beyond its borders (case in point: Iceland has more published authors per head of population than any other country. One in 10 Icelanders will publish a book in their lifetime).

So what is it in the glacier water? Laufey has a practical response: the welfare system. “The way the education system is set up in Iceland makes it so you’re amongst many different types of people,” she says, noting that even the so-called private schools are funded by the government. “In general, you just go to your neighborhood school.”

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Simultaneously, Laufey points out that there is less of a “race to university” than in the US, UK and Asia. “There’s a lot less pressure on students to all become doctors, lawyers, computer scientists – whatever,” she says. “And because university is inexpensive and free in many cases, you can take a year off to try to act or write a book or become a choreographer or a singer.” She reckons over half of her classmates took a year off (or two or three) to pursue some sort of passion before going to university.

Meanwhile, from Laufey’s perspective, being an artist was always a ‘real job’. “There’s just an abundance of role models,” she says. “I mean, my mom is literally a violinist.” And then there’s the weather. “Maybe there’s something about it being a little bit dark and depressing during the winter that makes you want to put your head down and write music,” she says.

Having blown up on the internet, the first time Laufey met her fans in person they were already intimately familiar with her and her music. She recalls this phenomenon most vividly at her first concert in New York, at the since-shuttered Rockwood Music Hall on the Lower East Side. “I knew it was sold out, which was cool, but I didn’t think that it meant anything,” she says, noting that having come from the classical world, she assumed “sold out" meant that all the seats were filled (Rockwood didn’t even have seating). “I remember my manager came bursting into the green room and was like, ‘Oh my god, the line is crazy’.” Her manager produced a video of a line wrapping around the block, the likes of which the venue had never seen.

“They came into the venue and I played and everyone was singing along to every single lyric,” Laufey says. “It was the craziest thing, because I’d never heard anyone memorise my music.” The girls (Gen-Z, mostly, but some a bit older, too) in the 300-person audience had already adopted the Lauver look, wearing babydoll dresses and bows in their hair. “The boys were dressed kind of cute as well, in sweater vests and loafers,” she says. “I just remember being like, ‘Wow, this is so cool’. I did not grow up popular. You know what it was, honestly, I saw people dressed like me after years of being shat on for dressing like this.”

As a child, whilst her Icelandic peers were dressing seasonally-appropriate (though not very fashionably) in sweatpants and cosy knitwear, Laufey was wearing flouncy skirts and frilly blouses. Much like her music, the look was culled from a mishmash of reference points; old films, the Madeline book series, her own mother and Tumblr images of Alexa Chung. It didn’t always land among her peers. “There was one girl – I wouldn’t go so far as to say she was bullying me, but I remember when we were in third grade, she sent me on Facebook Messenger: ‘And you always wear skirts to school, and it’s ugly’,” says Laufey. “People would make fun of me and my sister for always being very dressed up.”

In a full-circle fashion moment during Paris Fashion Week earlier this year, Laufey was attending a Chloé afterparty, for which her stylist, Leith Clark (“She was one of the originators of twee, so the fact that I get to work with her now… It’s amazing”) had selected a purple babydoll frock. “I went to the fitting and they were like, ‘Someone else has taken the purple dress’,” says Laufey. That evening, she walked into the party (in a different, equally lovely Chloé look) and who should be wearing the dress but her childhood style icon, Alexa Chung. “It was one of the best moments,” says Laufey. “I went up to her and I was like, ‘Hi! I’m such a big fan’.”

Laufey’s Alexa Chung stan-dom goes further than an admiration for the It girl’s great style. Like Laufey, Chung is half-Chinese, making her a rare public person in which Laufey saw a bit of herself. “I had nobody that was my ethnicity to look up to as a kid, especially a kid in Iceland,” says Laufey. “And she was, like, the coolest girl ever.”

With the records signed and the album release imminent, Laufey is looking forward to the subsequent tour. A singular sound needs a singular show, and Laufey’s, which will feature ambitious practical sets and a healthy dose of humour, will be conceived by Amy Sherman-Palladino, best known as the creator of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Gilmore Girls. “She’s writing the narrative for the show, and she’s like, ‘I’ve never done this before’, and I’m like, ‘Because noone has done this before’,” says Laufey, a self-described Gilmore Girls fanatic (for those wondering, when it comes to protagonist Rory Gilmore’s love life, Laufey was previously team Logan but now identifies as team Jess. “He’s an asshole for 80 per cent of the show,” she says. “But Rory needed Jess to pull her out of her shell”).

Of course no one has done this before. That’s sort of Laufey’s MO – carving out her own space in the universe, becoming the sort of icon young girls place on moodboards. The sort of icon that makes her fans feel less alone. Before we bid farewell (Junia will be coming over any moment with a matcha beverage), I ask what sort of advice Laufey would bestow upon her younger self; the girl growing up in Iceland, chasing beauty. “I would say to just put yourself everywhere and believe in yourself – there’s space for someone like you,” she says. “There’s space for everybody.”