Laufey Is an 'Anxious Cinderella' on New Album 'A Matter of Time'

Newsweek

17 hours ago

"Dark sarcasm" isn't something that one would expect to hear in the jazz- and classical-influenced pop of Laufey. The 26-year-old Icelandic-Chinese musician is known for her romantic and dreamy tunes inspired by the Great American Songbook—a canon of classic pop songs, Broadway numbers and jazz standards from the first half of the 20th century, including works by such composers as George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hammerstein—and rendered with a Gen Z perspective. Yet several songs on her upcoming new record, A Matter of Time (August 22), take a more candid—and at times, sobering—tone that contrasts with her earlier material about growing up and being in love at a young age.
Album announcement
Album announcement
Emma Summerton
"I'm a very sarcastic person," Laufey (pronounced Lay-vay) tells Newsweek. "With the last album [2023's Bewitched], I showed the light, and I wanted to show a little bit of darkness on this album. I had a lot of fun doing it. It's kind of like an anxious Cinderella."
A Matter of Time, Laufey's third studio record, marks another step in the career of the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter, whose story reads like a fairy tale come to life. Since her 2022 debut album, Everything I Know About Love, Laufey has played sold-out shows; performed with such artists as beabadoobee, Norah Jones, Barbra Streisand and Billy Joel; and won a Grammy Award in 2024 for her second record, Bewitched. Her music attracts nearly 19 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and her TikTok account has 8.7 million followers.
Larger and Bolder Sound
For A Matter of Time, Laufey says she wanted to make a work that sounded larger and bolder. "But at the core," she adds, "I didn't want to move too much away from my own sound. There's definitely more sonic exploration on the album, which was really important to me."
Helping Laufey achieve that vision were her longtime producer Spencer Stewart and, for the first time, The National's Aaron Dessner, whose production credits include albums for Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams. "I've always wanted to work with Aaron," Laufey says. "I'm such a big fan of his and The National. I worked with Aaron [on] a session, and something felt really right about it. It brought a level of speed and shine to the album that I was looking for."
An example of Laufey branching out stylistically for this record is the country-inspired track "Clean Air." "It's about letting go of something toxic from the past, whether it's a job, a relationship or a friend," she says. "It immediately landed in this dreamy country world. I love the harmonies of Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. I wanted to have that sound in some way, and it felt like it wasn't a far toss from my world."
The song "Silver Lining," the first single released ahead of the new album, recalls early 1960s pop music; Laufey wrote it while she was at Electric Lady Studios in New York City. "I found this vintage electric guitar in a corner and was like, 'I want to write a '60s song with the fun strings and this mid-century vibe and reverbed-out kind of sound.' I wanted it to be a love song, but sarcastic. Icelanders are not good at saying things very directly. We find these side ways of saying it. And I think 'Silver Lining' was kind of my way to do that."
Yet A Matter of Time isn't a drastic stylistic left turn from Laufey's first two albums—the lush and elegant arrangements and her sublime torchy singing voice remain the cores of her work, such as on the bossa-nova-styled "Lover Girl" and "Clockwork." But her perspectives about love and the world around her have matured. "It's definitely more bold as well," she says of the lyrics. "It's more honest. It's more raw. It was a fun challenge finding growth within myself."
Snow White lead
Snow White lead
Emma Summerton
The feisty "Tough Luck," which finds Laufey throwing shade at a rotten boyfriend, is a notable counterpoint to her usual romantic perspective. "I just wanted to write a mean song," she says. "I had this experience, and it was so funny to me. I was like, 'This is a song.'" On the lush and heartbreaking "Snow White," she critiques idealized beauty with the ironic lyric: "A woman's best currency is her body, not her brain." "I was frustrated with beauty standards and myself for needing to compete with those standards," she says. "Like, 'Why can't I just remove myself?' The lyrics are about how the world has kind of set us all up to need to fit into those standards to compete."
"Sabotage" is the album's final and most dramatic track, featuring a dissonant-sounding coda that seems more appropriate for an indie rocker than a pop song; Laufey calls "Sabotage" the album's thesis statement. "It's about that contrast between this glass-like beauty and chaos. This album, for me, showcases the complexity of female emotion to the world. So often, we're good at putting up a beautiful front on the outside, but then there's a noise or mess going on inside, this anxiety. I wanted to find a way to use songwriting and music to describe that contrast."
Although Los Angeles is her current home, Laufey pays homage to her Icelandic roots on the track "Forget-Me-Not," recorded with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra; some of the lyrics were written in her native language. "It's a song about the experience of leaving your home country and feeling like you're losing it a little bit," she says. "This was my way of reaching back and reminding it that I love [Iceland] and pleading to 'not forget me.' And so the lyrics—at least in the chorus—had to be in Icelandic because I want to speak to its soul."
Born Laufey Lín Bing Jónsdóttir, she was introduced to classical music through her Chinese violinist mother, and her exposure to jazz-pop standards came courtesy of her Icelandic father's record collection. At a young age, she played both cello and piano. "I was like listening to orchestra rehearsals in my mother's womb," Laufey, who was raised in Reykjavík and Washington, D.C., says. "I was given a violin when I was 2. Classical music was what I've heard at home my whole life. But also, it was a lot of jazz music and the Beatles."
Although she harbored the idea of becoming a singer in addition to being a musician, Laufey initially didn't think it was realistic for her to forge a career in the vintage music that she grew up with. "I didn't have any example of success from somebody who looked or sounded like me in current times. My favorite singers were from the '40s, '50s and '60s. So I just didn't believe it. I knew that music was always going to be a huge part of my life. I was just too scared to jump into it.
Laufey later attended Berklee College of Music in Boston on a scholarship, which was a turning point for her. "There were so many people writing around me, and it kind of empowered me to explore my sound and try things. So I started writing in a way that reflected my favorite music, which was songs from the Great American Songbook. I realized that if I wrote in that form but used modern experiences, it could create something that people would be interested in."
Her breakthrough came when she wrote and released a single, "Street by Street," in 2020 that topped the Icelandic radio charts. Laufey's fame grew around this period when she started posting popular videos online of her performances of classic standards by jazz legends such as Ella Fitzgerald and Chet Baker, as well as her original compositions. Through AWAL, a record company that allows its artists to retain ownership of their work, she released her albums Everything I Know About Love and, a year later in 2023, Bewitched.
'A Generation of Mixture'
Much has been written about Laufey's huge popularity with her Gen Z audiences, which is remarkable given that jazz and pop songs from the 1920s to the 1960s are generally a tough sell to mainstream youth. One major aspect of Laufey's appeal to her young fan base is that, underneath the music, her mostly autobiographical lyrics are relatable and contemporary.
"I loved it [the Songbook sound] so much growing up.... It's very natural to me to advocate for that. I couldn't fake being a pop singer—this is just what I do. I'm so lucky that people are interested in it. I think it's because Gen Z is just so open to different styles of music. And with the amount of access we have to music from all different genres and decades, the palette of young listeners has really changed.
"There are so many artists who have styles that don't fall into a certain box, but are applauded because we are a generation of mixture. So many of my fan base are mixed race like me or from different cultural backgrounds. I think that's a part of it."
Laufeyperforms with Gustavo Dudamel & LA Phil at the Coachella Stage during the 2025 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on April 19, 2025 in Indio, California.
Laufeyperforms with Gustavo Dudamel & LA Phil at the Coachella Stage during the 2025 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on April 19, 2025 in Indio, California.for Coachella
Laufey will be touring large arenas in support of the new album—further evidence of her growing popularity—including two nights at New York City's Madison Square Garden. Yet she has stayed mostly grounded through all of the attention. "I've been practicing that since I was so young," she says, "like the highs and lows of going on stage, playing a recital, coming back home and knowing that I still have to finish my homework the next day. My Chinese upbringing is, 'Stay humble and thankful and respect everyone around you.' That is something that I carry with me always."
"I am in true shock over my career," she adds. "It's always surprising to me. It's very hard to have any sort of ego about it when I'm kind of curious as to how it even happened in the first place."
Further Listening
Everything I Know About Love [ARTWORK]
Everything I Know About Love [ARTWORK]
Emma Summerton
Everything I Know About Love AWAL, 2022
If someone was listening to Laufey's 2022 debut album for the first time and did not know that its music consisted of mostly original material, they could've sworn she was interpreting classic Broadway and jazz-pop songs from the era of Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Tony Bennett. That's a credit to how Laufey faithfully mines that era with letter-perfect precision and authenticity: from the melodies and lovelorn lyrics to Laufey's wistful and sultry voice. "It's about dealing with growing up," Laufey said of the album in a press release at the time. "It's also very 'hopeless romantic.' All the songs are based on my personal experiences in the past years, but the way I write about them is like fiction."
Bewitched Cover
Bewitched Cover
Emma Summerton
Bewitched AWAL, 2023
Laufey didn't experience the dreaded sophomore slump with Bewitched. Instead, it won a Grammy in 2024 under the best traditional pop vocal album category. In addition to containing the hugely popular "From the Start" and the title song, Bewitched features Laufey's cover of the Erroll Garner standard "Misty." "This is a love album," she said in a previous statement, "whether it be a love towards a friend or a lover or life. The first album also touched a lot on things like moving out of my childhood home and moving into a new city for the first time—being an adult. With this one, I've experienced a little bit more of that, and I'm writing about the magic in the love of being young."