It’s six several hours before showtime and a queue of teens already lines the road outdoors east London’s EartH arts venue. They are sitting down patiently on the pavement and finishing their homework or taking part in Uno, hoping to get to the entrance of the stage for the to start with of a few offered-out reveals by 24-12 months-aged singer-songwriter Laufey Jónsdóttir. Overhead, the gray February afternoon threatens to split into rain.
Inside of, sitting upcoming to the peeling partitions of her dressing space in a pristine gingham gown, Jónsdóttir is unfazed by the concentrations of anticipation.
“Since we place on my initially headline demonstrates in 2021, they have constantly sold out,” she claims. “I don’t get anxious in advance of I perform, for the reason that as quickly as I’m on stage it’s this quick release to sing and connect with the viewers. It’s the ideal element of being a musician.”
It is unsurprising that Jónsdóttir – identified merely as Laufey, pronounced Lay-vay – has only played sold-out reveals, due to the fact the statistics that have accompanied her in the four yrs considering the fact that she unveiled her 2020 debut single, Road By Street, are stunning. She has much more than 4 million followers on TikTok, where by her music have absent viral multiple moments, extra than 2 million on Instagram, and in 2023 conquer Björk and Sigur Rós to turn out to be the most streamed artist from Iceland. That similar year, she performed bought-out demonstrates to additional than 60,000 people today across the earth and released collaborations with Norah Jones and Beabadoobee. Famous lovers incorporate Billie Eilish, who cheered her on in February when she grew to become the youngest person to win the Grammy for Best Standard Pop Vocal Album – an award previously received by the likes of Tony Bennett, Joni Mitchell and Michael Bublé. She is now embarking on a earth tour that will see her perform the Royal Albert Corridor, cross Europe, head to the US and even conduct with the Manila Philharmonic Orchestra in the Philippines. Each and every clearly show is, of system, bought out.
Even additional astounding than her rapid ascent is the variety of tunes that Laufey can make. Across her two albums, 2022’s Everything I Know About Really like and 2023’s Bewitched, she has perfected a combine of 1950s-motivated classic jazz vocals with luscious symphony orchestrations and confessional Taylor Swift-esque songwriting, spawning a new kind of pop. Enjoying like TikTok’s respond to to Norah Jones, Laufey is building crooning jazz palatable to teen audiences for the very first time in many years, her torch tunes harking again to a sepia-tinted entire world they have by no means identified.
“The music I make has older inspirations but the lyrics are really present day,” she claims. “I really don’t see myself as somebody who should really have existed in a unique decade. I’m very a great deal a 21st-century lady and love residing in this time, considering the fact that there is no improved time to be a woman.”
Without a doubt, Laufey’s songwriting can take in each and every element of modern-day romance, from tales of spying a crush on the tube (From the Begin) to the emotional perils of situationships (Guarantee), all couched in the heat of her reduced-sign-up, Ella Fitzgerald-referencing vocals.
“I also consider there is no superior time to be a musician, mainly because audiences have never been as open as they are right now,” she adds. “We have an abundance of methods to listen to all sorts of songs, and it is no longer about genre, it is about emotion and mood. At the conclude of the working day, younger persons want to pay attention to youthful individuals, they really do not want to hear to older folks preach to them.”
Born in Reykjavik to an Icelandic father and Chinese mom, Laufey and her identical twin sister, Júnía, grew up steeped in audio. Her mom is a violinist for the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, though her maternal grandparents were being professors of violin and piano. Motivated by the jazz records in her dad’s selection, as effectively as her mother’s love of the classical repertoire, Laufey was offered her initially violin at the age of two, in advance of taking piano lessons at four and cello lessons at 8. “Initially, I wanted to be pushed to do music,” she claims. “But I’m grateful that my mom made me practise each individual working day for an hour, because when I attained 13, it out of the blue clicked.”
Becoming a member of a youth orchestra as she entered her teenagers, songs shortly turned a social endeavour as considerably as an escape from the sense of variation Laufey in any other case experienced as just one of the only people of color in her neighborhood.
“I undoubtedly felt like a foreigner, getting a person of the several Asians in Iceland, and getting lived partly in the States from 6 to 9 many years old,” she says. “On best of that, I was a nerdy orchestra child. I did not go residence to play with mates, I went home to practise. Songs became this project that I hoped would be my ticket to the big entire world of the States or the Uk.”
By 15, she experienced carried out as a cello soloist with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and entered Icelandic truth contest Ìsland Got Expertise, achieving the televised ultimate. “I was pretty stringent with willpower in superior school, I didn’t consume and I didn’t get together,” she claims. “I was fixed on accomplishing my goal of heading to a university abroad and receiving a full scholarship.”
The tough do the job paid off and in 2018, aged 19, she left home to go to Boston’s Berklee Higher education of Music on a prestigious Presidential scholarship. There followed two many years full of firsts: her to start with practical experience of dwelling aside from Júnía, her initially time researching jazz alternatively than classical music, and her 1st romances. “I gained independence for the initially time, I was no for a longer period element of a twin unit and I was just residing as a girl,” she says with a smile. “I was like, let us develop up and stay a little, and all of a sudden I experienced all these experiences to create about.”
Filling up her songbook with new encounters in romance, rejection and longing, Laufey was ready to examination her product with the community when Covid-19 hit. “We had nowhere to go and nowhere to engage in as musicians, so the online was truly the only position to current any kind of artwork,” she suggests. “I made use of lockdown to article video clips of myself on the web singing new music and I was stunned that it took off. We finished up growing a real viewers of young people today.”
In April 2020, she independently launched Street By Avenue, a plaintive, folks-affected ballad about reclaiming a metropolis from its reminiscences of an ex. But it was not until Laufey made a TikTok movie singing her music Valentine the pursuing calendar year that she absolutely went viral. “It’s just a jazz song that I wrote on Valentine’s Day, type of as a joke, but at the time I posted it, my cellular phone started out blowing up,” she states. “Now it’s grow to be like a new normal. It is exciting that a track I wrote as a homage to the past can be recognized as new songs.”
Eventually, this is the essence of Laufey’s musical attraction – repurposing previous seems to create a wistful nostalgia for an period that her teen fanbase have hardly ever known. Whilst her debut album, Everything I Know About Like, was shaped largely of those people Berklee dorm area tunes, her newest launch, Bewitched, sees Laufey in much more highly developed musical territory, co-developing and even composing classical music for the very first time – all the although remaining an independent artist with out a main label deal.
“It’s extra experienced simply because I’ve developed as a particular person,” she claims. “Not a single take note is played on the music without the need of me currently being in the space, and it is all musicians playing authentic devices. We’re all just hoping to provide classical and jazz tunes to new audiences.”
A emphasize on the album is the shifting jazz ballad Letter To My 13 Calendar year Aged Self, wherever Laufey sings softly about her teenage thoughts of inadequacy. “When I was more youthful, I felt so odd. I felt like a circus freak, mainly because I had this very low voice and there were so number of Asian singer-songwriters to glimpse up to,” she says, her head bowed. “I wrote Letter To My 13 Year Old Self due to the fact I was reflecting on how I experienced these huge dreams but I didn’t assume they were achievable. I didn’t truly feel neat more than enough or wonderful enough. I have a good deal of younger fans now who have similar goals and I want to persuade them as well.”
Again at EartH in Hackney, extra than 1,200 of all those enthusiasts permit out a deafening roar although Laufey performs every thing from 40s jazz standard I Wish You Like to her individual 21st-century standard Valentine at EartH. As she draws to a shut, she sings Letter To My 13 Year Previous Self and addresses the group. “I truly feel like I grew to become the artist that I was lacking when I was youthful and it would make me definitely, definitely delighted,” she says, her voice quavering. “Every night I appear out into my group it feels like the local community I often required but hardly ever had.” Her audience cheers and some wipe away tears from their cheeks, nodding to each individual other. It would seem this demonstrate was truly worth the wait.