It’s a hot Wednesday afternoon in Chelsea, and Laufey is rapping to me with seriously impressive speed and skill. She may be a TikTok jazz sensation with incredibly modern, catchy, feminist lyrics, but her range clearly extends way past that.
Prodigal classical music talent runs in her veins after all – Laufey's mother is a violinist in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, and her grandfather was a violin teacher at the Central Conservatory of Music in China. When her TikTok following began to grow during the pandemic, she vowed to use the popularity of her modern lyrics and jazz-infused to push for the genre to be more accessible to younger audiences.
The Wednesday star on her ‘legendary’ co-stars, coping with fame and how the industry still needs to fight for diversity and representation
She's even set up her own foundation in service of this, which works to expand access to youth music and orchestral educational programmes for younger generations, for a potential career or merely to “have music as part of their Rolodex" or a means of therapy.
We meet at townhouse boutique hotel 11 Cadogan Gardens, which is tucked behind London's Sloane Square. The surroundings and shoot are completely and utterly chic, with Laufey sprawled on a hotel bed, her pout perfected. “There’s no reason that women shouldn’t be writing more music. You look at the heads of record labels and publishers and stuff, and it's still mostly men – there's no reason it should be.” A bottle of champagne is delivered during proceedings, which she declines (arguably in true sober curious Gen Z style) as she's avoiding drinking while on tour.
Once she has extensively showcased her delightful rap repertoire, Laufey is keen to tell me why London is her favourite city. “As a classical musician, there's a scene for classical music here and appreciation,” she explains. “There's a base level understanding of different cultural mediums that is really unique to London.”
We're meeting to talk about her upcoming third studio album, A Matter of Time, which is out later this month. Laufey tells me it is about “the various emotions that women go through in a day”.“It's never one thing," she says. "I think I go through every emotion [through] every 24-hour cycle. I wanted the album to feel like that too, how quickly you can go from rage to calm.”
Four days after we speak, Laufey makes a surprise appearance on Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage during Noah Kahan's set. The duo sung his track Call Your Mom together, after he introduced Laufey as “one of the greatest voices I've ever heard”. Among other accolades, Laufey won a Grammy in 2024 for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. Billie Eilish is a fan, and even congratulated her just after she collected her award.
She reacalls: “I was walking in the tunnel and she was walking [towards] me and she was like, ‘Hey, congratulations.’ I was like, 'How the f**k do you know who I am and how did you know that?' That was really cool.” Laufey describes the feeling of winning a Grammy as “like getting a good grade on an essay”.
“It's validation from theorists, from professionals, from teachers, it feels like,” she says. “It was really cool, and especially because I feel like I just mess around on the internet and put out music for fun. It is cool.”
This means even more to her, she explains, because she hasn’t travelled the traditional road when it comes to a pop artist’s career, or a jazz musician’s. “To get that validation from the people who adhere to those [traditional] pillars, it was really, really cool.”
Laufey and her fans have dubbed this year Lover Girl Summer (a rather different beast to Charli XCX's 2024 Brat summer), inspired by her single, Lover Girl. “I think during the summer everyone should take on a lover girl mindset, which to me is just a form of optimism and seeing everything through a romantic lens,” she explains.
Love has been on Laufey's mind since the beginning of her career, with her 2022 debut album appropriately named Everything I Know About Love. When I ask her if we can ever truly know anything about love, she responds “I don't think so. All of my albums are just really research on love and love in life. I think what I've learned about love now and what A Matter of Time really explores is how much you learned about yourself while you fall in love, and how many of your flaws will come out.
“Basically, the thesis of A Matter of Time is that you cannot hide a single part of yourself from the person that you fall in love with.” I tell her that, at times, I’ve seen perhaps the absolute worst of myself from falling in love. She agrees, stating it brings out “all of your trauma. I thought I was trauma free.”
Given the swoony, croony nature of her music, I ask Laufey if she herself is a romantic. Her response is “of course”. “When you grow up in a place like Iceland, you are forced to see the world through a romantic lens,” referring to the long, cold winters. Laufey tells GLAMOUR that she channeled that romantic vibe through music and watching romcoms – her favourite being When Harry Met Sally. She adds that 90s romcoms were much more “unserious” due to the fact that they weren’t subjected to the same online discourse that romcoms are on social media and other areas of the internet right now.
So what’s Laufey’s relationship with social media like? Like with so many female musicians, it’s complicated. “It's given me my career and it gives female artists a direct voice,” she says. “I get to show the world who I am and it doesn't go through anybody else, and I think that's actually a really valuable tool as an artist.”
But of course, there are downsides, not least its way of allowing fans and armchair critics alike to skewer her. “It's an interesting thing because with my last album, I didn't have a very big audience anticipating the music, and now you have people who love the last one and need to see you through the new,” she says, adding that some fans were maybe disappointed due to the poppier nature of her new music.
“But I've discovered that you really can't win because everybody has different tastes," Laufey says. "For me, the best thing I've been able to do is just to listen to my own intuition. I only have control over what I love… I didn't have boundaries before, and now I'm setting some.”
She concedes that she’s “definitely countered misogyny” in the music industry, particularly when she “dared to have a hand in the production” of her music. “I was trained to give that power away,” she says. “But then in my last two albums, especially this one, I've taken a really, really direct hand in producing and making sure that things are exactly the way I want them.”
For her, the balance of men and women behind the scenes is still off. “98, 99% of writers and producers are still men,” she says. “Though it is a great time, I think, to be a female artist, I don't think we're nearly done with the work that needs to be done. It really felt like the year of the female, especially last year with lots of incredible female musicians popping up or having their moments.”
Laufey declares her love for Chappell Roan (“an exemplary artist for so many reasons. You can tell the music comes from her heart”) as well as Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter and Ravyn Lenae. Perhaps women are leading the public-facing element of the music industry much more, but attitudes haven’t quite translated to behind the scenes.
“I think there's almost sometimes a base understanding that female singers don't know as much when it comes to talking to engineers and stuff like that – that's where I’ve found it… Maybe they didn't understand that I knew what I wanted.”
The answer to this? More female representation in songwriting and producing circles, as well as leadership positions at record labels. “There’s no reason that women shouldn’t be writing more music,” Laufey says. “You look at the heads of record labels and publishers and stuff, and it's still mostly men – there's no reason it should be… I have to truly stretch my mind to think of five producer-writers that are women, and I literally live in LA,” she says. “But that's one of the reasons I love Addison Rae and I love her project. Her producers are both girls, and they're my friends. They're so sweet.”
She also feels that women are expected to earn their respect in the industry. “I just hate that you get more respect as you grow as an artist,” she says. “I think as a female artist should get that respect from the very beginning.” There’s also undeniably a snobbery around female pop music, leading to assumptions that these stars “don’t know anything”. When in fact, she says, “a lot of those women are the most knowledgeable women I know.”
Sisterhood means the world to Laufey, not least because her identical twin sister Junia Lín – also a violinist – is her creative director and closest confidante. She's not with us on set today, because she's supervising an edit of one of her sister's music videos. “Every decision I make, aside from the music, I make with her,” Laufey says, admitting that the concept of sisterhood makes her feel “so emotional”.
"I feel so blessed to have a person that will tell you something exactly how it is, always. To be able to rely on that is really a true gift. Getting unfiltered opinions is something that gets harder and harder as you grow as an artist, and she will always give it to me straight and always keep me humble…. You're always just going to be your sister to your sister.”
She adds that she is never lonely on tour, because she has Junia Lín by her side. “Many people experience being an artist as a bit of an isolating experience, and it's been quite the opposite for me because I tour with her.”
Laufey has previously recalled a childhood memory of not feeling she could dress up as Hannah Montana like so many other young girls around her for Halloween, “because I have dark hair”, emphasising the importance of young generations seeing representations of themselves reflected in music icons. As a woman with mixed heritage – Icelandic and Chinese, to be exact – does she feel she's helping to right the whiteness that dominates the music industry?
“I have a large percentage of Asian fans, and that is the most beautiful thing to me in the world. Because when we're young, we just want to point at someone and be like, ‘Hey, I look like them.’ It's so simple. You look at a firefighter when you're a kid, you're like, ‘I want to be like that.’”
“I understand what it's like to be in a classroom full of kids that look different than you, and I write music for that person. I write music for my younger self. I say my music is for everyone, but I really hope that the young people out there who feel like they haven't been represented before can look at me and see a part of themselves in me. That means so much. I hope that they know that I'm singing to them, especially.”
A Matter Of Time is out on 22 August.
Photographer: Yuvali Theis
Stylist: Leith Clark
Hair: Luke Hersheson
Make-Up: Francesca Brazzo
Interview: Charley Ross
With thanks to our location 11 Cadogan Gardens
