When artist, composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Laufey was a child growing up in Iceland, she performed in a handful of local singing competitions. "I never really talk much about this," she tells me of her humble musical beginnings. "I was singing songs like 'Singing in the Rain.' … Everyone else was doing pop music. She lost. I remember feeling, 'Okay, this is not what people want.'" She made it far enough in the competition to believe in her talent, so she entered again. And again. And again.
For one of her final shows, she sang "Feeling Good" by Nina Simone. "I tried to find the songs that fit my voice and were more classic but that people still knew," she says of her choice. "But I only listened to jazz music and classical music [growing up]. I felt like I just existed on a completely different cloud of music than anything popular."
Laufey's mother was a classical violinist, as was her grandmother, so she always thought she'd follow in their footsteps as an instrumentalist over pursuing a career as a singer. "That was the most natural thing to me just because I spent my whole life playing cello, violin, and piano," she says. "I thought, 'I guess that's what I'll do.'"
The girls Laufey would compete against were often white and petite. She says they'd go onstage singing traditional pop songs and walk off with offers for modeling contracts and small record deals from local producers. Laufey's experience was different. "I wore glasses. I was always a little bit chubby. I had natural curly hair I didn't know how to [style]," she tells me. Because of her mature voice and song choices, everyone painted her as this adult woman, but in actuality, she felt like a baby. Their validation confirmed her belief that she had talent but not that it warranted any special attention or even a career. "Everyone was like, 'I'm going to be the next Hannah Montana,' and I was like, 'No you're not … and I'm not going to be either!'" she laughs. With no signs of a pop-star double life materializing for her, she decided to "study something normal" in college.
"I thought, 'I'll just study really, really hard and get into the best university I can get into,'" Laufey adds. She did, however, apply to one music school—Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she not only was accepted but also received a presidential scholarship to study cello. Ultimately, her mother persuaded her to go and study pop and jazz instead of attending her original first choice, University of St Andrews in Scotland, with her twin sister Junia.
When she finally arrived on the Berklee campus, Laufey was quite stressed that her life experience felt so limited in comparison to her classmates. "At that point, I was a jazz singer, a classical cellist, and a lover of pop music, but I'd never kissed a boy. I'd never gone on a date. I'd never even gone to a party," she says. She quickly accepted that maybe she needed to step outside her comfort zone. "I just realized that playing by the rules doesn't get you that far. I maxed out playing by the rules!" she says. "The last time you get rewarded for hard work and it actually gets you somewhere is getting into a good college or getting a scholarship. … I honestly believe that. Something clicked in me at Berklee. I was just like, 'Okay, let's fuck things up a little bit!'"
Attending Berklee was an eye-opening experience for Laufey. Everyone around her was writing and making music in ways that were unfamiliar and untraditional. Some of them weren't even reading music at all, which felt unfathomable to her. She described it as both cool and terrifying; it was a classical musician's nightmare but also a transgressing creative's dream. "All of a sudden, I was in all these jazz combos with these jazz musicians, and I was forced to improvise for the first time in my life, and at the same time, I was improvising with my life too. I started writing and dating and drinking and being a little bit of a heathen!" she laughs. Finally, she had material to write about and had the kind of confidence she'd been chasing up until that point in her life. The little girl so eager to please on those competitive stages started to feel like a distant past. "There were no rules anymore," she adds.
Except, there were still the rules of classical music, jazz music, pop music, and soul music, which she was studying every day. "I realized that nobody had been writing modern songs in a jazz standard form, and those were the songs I wanted to sing, but I wanted to sing my own stories," she says.
Laufey recalls sweating from excitement after writing her first-ever song. "It was the first thing I wrote where I was like, 'Oh my god, this is my style! This is my genre,'" she says. It was a modern story based on her life over a jazz harmony with elements of the Great American Songbook, a canon of the most influential American popular songs and jazz standards from the early 20th century. But just as she was about to record the song, her campus was shutting down because of COVID-19.
Laufey thought, "Oh my God, if I don't do this today … we are never going to. The song is not getting done." As her mother and sister packed up her dorm room, she went to her friend's place to finish the song.
Once she was back home in Iceland, the quiet of the pandemic inspired Laufey to post a video of her singing jazz standards to Instagram for her nearly 2000 followers. There was nothing else to do, and she had nothing to lose. "I made one video singing the song 'It Could Happen to You' [by Chet Baker] and accompanying it on cello. It kind of went viral," she says. Viral might be an understatement. The following day, she woke up to around 10,000 followers. The rapid overnight growth, while confusing, gave Laufey the clarity and validation she needed: Maybe people did want this kind of music, after all.
Three weeks later, in April of 2020, she released "Street by Street," the song she originally recorded at school.
The debut track was about someone who used to give her butterflies—a quick college fling gone wrong. "Step by step, brick by brick / I'm reclaiming what's mine / This city is way too small / To give away to just one guy," Laufey croons. Without her knowing it at the time, it would be her entryway to fucking things up—just a little bit, of course. Within the first month of her dropping the single, it garnered 100,000 streams. Today, it has over 43 million streams on Spotify.
Laufey chalks up her initial online success to people wanting something new and searching for an escape. "Nobody had done that before, and I know this because I am such a fan of music, and I wanted so badly to find an artist that was close to my age, that dressed in a way that I related to. I feel like I was looking for an Alexa Chung that sings jazz," she says.
I laugh when she tells me this because when I first came across Laufey on TikTok—where we've been mutuals since 2021—I was documenting my career as a fashion editor, and Laufey was charting hers as an emerging singer-songwriter. Up until that point, jazz music had never felt accessible to someone like myself, who grew up in Queens, New York, in a family of Spanish immigrants. It wasn't the kind of music I was raised on. But when Laufey came on my screen, outfitted in flowing lace tops and pastel ballet flats, it felt like music that could be the soundtrack to my life. To me, she was exactly like an Alexa Chung that sang jazz.
In many ways, that has always been somewhat of Laufey's goal. It's not the It-girl status or the perfect wispy hair, both of which she possesses. It's the ability to introduce classic genres of music to new audiences. "I was indoctrinated into classical music," she tells me. "It was just something that flowed through my veins, and I really care so deeply about keeping this kind of music and tradition alive and reintroducing it to young people. It's always been very sad to me that classical music and jazz music is something that feels not very accessible … or that it feels like something that's just for old people, intellectuals, or very educated people. For me, it's always just been this thing of beauty and joy [and] sometimes sadness."
Since making her mark in 2020, Laufey has gone on to release two full-length albums: 2022's Everything I Know About Love and 2023's Bewitched, for which she won a Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. Her 10,000 social media followers have now grown to over 13 million across Instagram and TikTok.
Last May, I went to Radio City Music Hall to see her perform during her Goddess Tour. When I walked through the doors, it didn't feel like I had just entered a concert. It felt like an after-school club, where who you're with is almost as exciting as what you've all agreed to do together. There is a charming camaraderie among her fans, and nearly every other attendee could be spotted with a long bow in their hair—a signature Laufey accessory—as if it were a team uniform.
Some of them were just meeting for the first time, complimenting each other's Laufey-inspired baby-doll dresses and asking which songs they were hoping to hear. When she walked onto the stage, I was just one person sitting in a sea of ribbon hair accessories, excited to hear jazz songs that didn't remind me of a bygone era but rather the exact time I was living in. When she performed "From the Start," a song about unrequited love with a friend who you wished was more than a friend, I watched someone in front of me nudge a friend and raise an eyebrow. "This is like with you know who," she said before whipping her bow-pinned hair back around to attentively watch Laufey as she pranced from stage left to right in a light-blue tulle Rodarte gown.
It's been almost a year since that show, and Laufey's latest single—this month's "Silver Lining"—marks the beginning of an exciting new era for the artist, where she's exploring love found instead of lost. "I love how when you're in love, you become this very silly, almost stupid version of yourself," she says of the inspiration behind her latest track. "Every single part of you is represented. The anxious! The beautiful! The kind of shitty! But the silver lining is that you're with this person, and I feel like that very perfectly encapsulates what I want to capture right now." The song doesn't take itself too seriously and includes a zinger line about going to hell: "So I propose / It's long overdue / When you go to hell, I'll go there with you too / And when we're punished / For being so cruel / The silver lining's I'll be there with you." It's a little less pristine than normal for Laufey. "I'm ready to show I'm an adult. … I can be both serious and silly," she says.
She's been thinking a lot lately about being a woman and the emotions you go through when you fall in and out of love. This idea is at the core of what she wants to tackle next with her music. "No matter how famous or whatever you get or how many people are watching, I've discovered that you're gonna go through those emotions. No amount of fame is gonna change that," she says. "When I was growing up, I thought that the biggest singer or actress in the world—who was so beautiful and so perfect and got to wear designer clothing and be in front of paparazzi—was somehow spared from the very dark and deep and painful emotions of heartbreak or fear of getting cheated on or anxiety, and that just couldn't be further from the truth. It doesn't really change anything."
That's precisely why everyone actually keeps asking for this, the exact thing Laufey is now known for doing. She's no longer that little curly-haired girl with glasses onstage in Iceland who played by the rules. She feels real—like a best friend with clothes you want to borrow and songs about the kind of love that feels familiar, all through a vintage lens you didn't know you loved. "I wanted somebody who wore the costume of a pop singer but was making music that was more tuned to my ears," Laufey tells me.
And so she became her.
Photographer: Elena Rendina
Stylist: Tatiana Cinquino
Hairstylist: Sami Knight
Makeup Artist: Kate Lee
Manicurist: Betina Goldstein
