by (Styling by Kate Sinclair. Hair and make-up by Elena Diaz. Top and skirt by Cecile Bahnsen. Ears by Margaux)Photo: Suki Dhanda/The Observer
It’s six hours before showtime and there’s already a queue of teenagers on the street outside East London’s East London arts centre. They’re sitting patiently on the pavement finishing their homework or playing Uno, as they wait to front the stage for the first of three sold-out shows by the 24-year-old singer-songwriter. Laufey Jónsdóttir. Above, the gray February afternoon threatens to break into rain.
Inside, sitting by the peeling walls of her dressing room in a stunning gingham dress, Jónsdóttir is not thrilled by the levels of anticipation.
“Since we put on my first headline shows in 2021, they’ve always sold out,” she says. “I don’t get nervous before I go, because as soon as I’m on stage it’s this immediate release to sing and connect with the audience. That’s the best part of being a musician.”
It’s no wonder that Jónsdóttir – known simply as Laufey, known as Lay-vay – has sold out shows given the statistics she’s had in the four years since she released her debut single in 2020 , Street By Street, great. She has more than 4 million followers on TikTok, where her songs have gone viral several times, more than 2 million on Instagram, and in 2023 she beat Björk and Sigur Rós to be the most streamed artist from Iceland . That same year, she played sold-out shows to over 60,000 people worldwide and released collaborations with Norah Jones and Beabadoobee. Among the famous fans is Billie Eilish, who cheered her on in February when she became the youngest person to win the Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Album – an award previously won by the likes of Tony Bennett, Joni Mitchell and Michael Bublé this. She is now embarking on a world tour where she will play the Royal Albert Hall, crisscross Europe, visit the USA and even play with the Manila Philharmonic Orchestra in the Philippines. All shows are, of course, sold out.
Even bigger than her rapid rise is the kind of music Laufey makes. Across his two albums, 2022’s All I know about love and 2023 Bewitched, she has combined classic 1950s jazz-inspired vocals with joyous symphonic orchestrations and confessional Taylor Swift-esque compositions, spawning a new form of pop music. Playing like TikTok’s answer to Norah Jones, Laufey is making delicious crooning jazz for teenage audiences for the first time in years, her torch songs harkening back to a sepia-tinted world that wasn’t known have ever had it.
“The music I make has an older inspiration but the lyrics are very modern,” she says. “I don’t see myself as someone who should be around for another ten years. I’m very much a 21st century girl and I love living in this time, because there’s no better time to be a woman.”
I definitely felt like a foreigner, being one of the few Asians in Iceland
Indeed, Laufey’s songwriting embraces all aspects of modern romance, from stories of spying crushes on the tube (From the Beginning) to the emotional stakes of situations (Promise), all added to the warmth of her low register, Ella Fitzgerald- reference voices.
“I also think there’s never been a better time to be a musician, because audiences have never been as open as they are today,” she says. “We have many ways to listen to all kinds of music, and it’s not about genre anymore, it’s about feeling and mood. At the end of the day, young people want to listen to young people, they don’t want to listen to old people preaching to them.”
Born in Reykjavík to an Icelandic father and a Chinese mother, Laufey and her identical twin sister, Junía, grew up heavily involved in music. Her mother is a violinist for the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, and her maternal grandparents were violin and piano professors. Inspired by the jazz records in her father’s collection, as well as her mother’s love of classical repertoire, Laufey was given her first violin at the age of two, before taking piano lessons at the age of four and cello lessons at eight. “At first, I had to be pushed to make music,” she says. “But I’m grateful that my mother made me practice every day for an hour, because when I got to 13, it suddenly clicked.”
Joining a youth orchestra in her mid-teens, music soon became a social endeavor as well as an escape from the sense of difference Laufey otherwise experienced as one of the only people of color in her community. .
“I definitely felt like an outsider, being one of the few Asians in Iceland, and having lived partly in the States from the age of six to nine,” she says. “Besides that, I was a nerdy orchestral kid. I didn’t go home to play with friends, I went home to practice. Music emerged as a project that I hoped would be my ticket to the big world of the States or the UK.”
By 15, she was singing as a cello soloist with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and entered an Icelandic reality competition Got Ìsland Talent, reaching the televsion final. “I was very disciplined in high school, I didn’t drink and I didn’t party,” she says. “I was determined to achieve my goal, to go to a university abroad and get a full scholarship.”
The hard work paid off and in 2018, aged 19, she left home to attend Boston’s Berklee College of Music on a prestigious Presidential scholarship. After that there were two years full of firsts: her first experience of living apart from Júnía, her first time studying jazz music instead of classical music, and her first romance. “I found independence for the first time, I was no longer a member of two units and I was living as a woman,” she says with a smile. “I was like, let’s grow up and live a little, and suddenly I had all these experiences to write about.”
Filling up her songbook with new encounters in romance, rejection and the long term, Laufey was ready to test her material with the public when Covid-19 hit. “We had nowhere to go and nowhere to perform as musicians, so the only place to present any kind of art was the internet, ” she says. “I used the lockdown to post videos of myself online singing new songs and I was surprised it happened. In the end we grew a real audience of young people.”
In April 2020, she independently released Street By Street, a plaintive, country-influenced ballad about reclaiming a city from her memories of an ex-husband. But it wasn’t until Laufey made a TikTok video of her singing her Valentine song the following year that she went completely viral. “It’s just a jazz song I wrote on Valentine’s Day, which was like a joke, but when I put it up, my phone started blowing up,” she says. “It’s now like a new standard. It’s amazing that a song I wrote as a tribute to the past can be understood as new music.”
Ultimately, this is the core of Laufey’s musical appeal – recreating old sounds to create a daring nostalgia for an era her teenage fans never knew. During her first album, All I know about lovemade mostly of Berklee dorm room songs, his latest release, Bewitched, Laufey sees himself in more advanced musical territory, co-producing and even composing classical music for the first time – while still an independent artist without a major label contract.
“It’s more mature because I’ve grown as a person,” she says. “Not one note is played on the songs without me in the room, and it’s all musicians playing real instruments. We’re all just trying to bring classical music and jazz to a new audience.”
A highlight of the album is the moving jazz ballad Letter To My 13 Year Old Self, where Laufey sings softly about her teenage feelings of inadequacy. “When I was younger, I felt so strange. I felt like a circus freak, because I had this low voice and there were so many Asian singers and composers to look up to,” she says, nodding her head. “I wrote a Letter to My 13-Year-Old Self because I was thinking about how I had these big dreams but didn’t think they were possible. I didn’t feel cool enough or beautiful enough. I now have many younger followers who have similar dreams and I want to inspire them too.”
Back at EarthH in Hackney, more than 1,200 of those fans let out a deafening roar as Laufey plays everything from the 40s jazz standard I Wish You Love to her own 21st century Valentine standard at EarthH. As she nears the end, she sings Letter To My 13 Year Old Self and addresses the crowd. “I feel like I’ve become the artist I was missing when I was younger and it makes me very happy,” she says, negotiating. “Every night I look at my crowd it feels like the crowd I’ve always wanted but never had.” His audience cheers and a few others who let the tears roll down their cheeks, kiss each other. Looks like this show was worth the wait.
• Laufey plays the Roundhouse, London on March 13, and the Royal Albert Hall on May 16. Bewitched out now on AWAL Recordings
