Sick of Taylor Swift's pure pop? This is the artist you should know

Sydney Morning Herald

a day ago

She's Gen Z's poster girl for pop sophistication, the breakout Icelandic cellist who somehow managed to bring jazz and classical nous – not to mention Old Hollywood glamour – to TikTok and the pop charts. But petty payback looks good on Laufey.
It's there on Tough Luck, the second single from her third album A Matter of Time, where – over her slyly swelling cello and sweetly fluttering vocal lines – she brutally lacerates some undeserving jerk who lied and cheated and broke her heart (just like he 'did to the actress before me,' she sings).
'I just wanted to write something that I knew this guy would absolutely hate. Like, musically hate. That was my goal, especially the bridge,' says Laufey.
That bridge is the sort of kiss-off you might find in a Taylor Swift-meets-the-orchestra scenario, with frenetic strings and bitter insults amping to a frantic climax. She wrote the song in her old bedroom in Iceland as a sort of angry exorcism, a lancing of frail male ego. They're not quite the words I was expecting while interviewing Laufey, but she calls it her 'f— you track'.
'It's my 'f— you track', and I had so much fun making it,' she says. 'I've never gotten to be angry in that way on a song, and I felt like I needed to do it.'
Men are one thing, but at least music's a happier pursuit. The breakout success of her second album, 2023's Bewitched – which put Laufey atop global pop charts alongside Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish, and set records on Spotify as the biggest ever debut for a jazz album – proved the TikTok attention that had followed her even before her 2022 debut, Everything I Know About Love, wasn't some online anomaly.
To put her rise in a local light, the first time Laufey toured Australia in June 2023, she performed at 500-capacity venues like Sydney's Oxford Art Factory and Melbourne's Howler; by the time she returned last September, she was at the Sydney Opera House.
'It's felt pretty quick, and it's definitely been very unexpected; I've had to readjust my understanding of what my career was, just to keep up with the speed of it,' says Laufey. 'I'm pleasantly surprised by how well people have taken to my music.'
Among the pop acclaim and chart success of the past 12 months were a number of pinch-me moments. Barbra Streisand asked to duet on her own track Letter to My 13-Year-Old Self; her stylistic forebear and formative idol Norah Jones is now a regular text buddy ('She gives such good advice,' says Laufey). Also, Bewitched won a Grammy for best traditional pop vocal album.
'Knowing that I started online and I grew this audience from the internet basically, to get validation from something like the Grammys, these real artists and industry people who are vouching for it, that was definitely beyond anything I'd ever thought possible,' she says.
Ever demure in a lace dress, her middle-part pristine, Laufey, 26, is speaking over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles, where she's lived now for four years (her identical twin sister Junia, a violinist and Laufey's creative director, hovers nearby). She first moved to the US at 19, when she was studying at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. Things were Trump-y then, but not like now.
'Living in America in this climate is interesting. I feel like every time I go back to Iceland, I have to explain myself,' she says. 'But one of the reasons America has so many problems is one of the reasons I love it most, which is its diversity.'
Born to an Icelandic father and a Chinese mother who played violin in the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, the singer has spoken often about the cultural alienation she felt growing up in Reykjavík. 'I feel like I'm on the edge of so many different cultures here in LA, which I didn't get a lot of growing up. I feel very much like I'm not a foreigner here, and I feel like a foreigner everywhere.'
Barely three years into her recording career, it's easy to overlook just how unlikely Laufey's success has been. Classic crooners and jazz icons – like Laufey's oft-cited influences Ella Fitzgerald, Astrud Gilberto and Chet Baker – are timeless for a reason, but the fact Bewitched captured a Gen Z audience without any concession to current pop sounds is still a miracle to the singer.
'I didn't skip any steps. I made the most honest, classic album that was very true to my sound. I didn't try to appeal to pop crowds or labels or charts or anything. I just made the music I felt I needed to make, and for that success to be born out of that was really cool,' she says. 'It tells me that honest art still has a chance, and that anything can find its audience.'
That success also freed her up for her follow-up, A Matter of Time. A sorta-concept album about 'the chaos of emotions you go through in a 24-hour cycle, how you can be soft and strong at the same time, crazy and calm', it finds Laufey adding an extra dash of pop to her signature jazz-classical mélange. 'I think I've already shown the world who I am, so I was less preoccupied with the purity of the music and more interested in what I wanted to say.'
To help that vision, she recruited Aaron Dessner as a co-writer and producer (working alongside her usual collaborator Spencer Stewart). Dessner – like Laufey, an identical twin with his brother and bandmate in The National, Bryce – famously collaborated with Taylor Swift in her Folklore and Evermore eras. Growing up, Swift was one of the few contemporary artists Laufey listened to.
'And my favourite albums of hers are the ones she's done with Aaron, so I always wanted to see if I could work with him,' she says. 'I love what we did together. It brought a shine and speed and freedom to my music that I was really craving.'
The result is typically idiosyncratic. This might be the only pop album punctuated by a ballet interlude (the ambitious orchestral piece, Cuckoo Ballet). Forget-Me-Not is Laufey's evocative love letter to Iceland, a folk song sung in her native tongue about her fear of losing her culture.
Newfound fame, meanwhile, has also pierced her inner life. On Carousel, she sings 'My life is a circus', apologetically bringing in a potential lover to her public bedlam. On Snow White, she sings about beauty standards and her struggles with self-image amid increased public scrutiny.
'I've always been, and I think most women are, quite insecure, and beauty standards are so impossible nowadays. But because there's so many people watching now, the pressure to keep cool, calm and collected is a bit different,' she says. ' Snow White, for me, was a coming-to-terms with the fact that I'll never be this perfect vision.'
Other songs like Too Little Too Late, A Cautionary Tale and Mr. Eclectic (sample lyric: 'Truth be told, you're quite pathetic/ Mr. Eclectic Allan Poe') are vicious and acerbic. They're the kind of songs that will leave you asking, 'Laufey, who hurt you?'
She laughs. 'Most of those songs are born out of some sort of personal thought or experience. But they're also taken from anecdotes from my sister and conversations with my friends.'
Much of Laufey's rise has been due to her pointed, diaristic writing; in the way modern anxieties punctured the dreamy gloss of, say, a timeless waltz or a retro bossa nova. Being so famous now, does it make the job that much harder? All of a sudden, here are people like me asking, 'So who exactly are you writing about?'
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'No, it's not any harder, because I'll never admit to any song being about anyone,' she says.
Sure, but what about the fan theories online, the Reddit threads and TikTok videos speculating about her private life? (For some reason, Maude Apatow's even involved.)
'I've seen all kinds of theories that are all wrong,' she says. 'I don't know, I can't think about that. There's a line of ambiguity threaded through everything I do. I'm just making music and having a lot of fun with it.'