How jazz-sensation Laufey turned lockdown into a world tour: The Icelandic artist's untold story

Recently, in the back of a London Uber, Laufey experienced a tell-tale sign that her star is rapidly rising. The Icelandic musician, whose singular sound fuses bedroom pop with classic jazz, had just finished an interview and was travelling with her publicist to her next appointment. The duo were using the rare moment of solitude to “catch up both on a career and personal level”. “I'm spilling all my secrets all in deep detail just for the Uber driver to turn around like two minutes before the trip ends and go, ‘Oh, by the way, I'm a massive fan’,” she says. “And I'm like, ‘Oh well, now you know everything about me’.”

While this sort of fan experience is still novel for Laufey, who currently calls Los Angeles home, it’s a fairly common occurrence for her London-based identical twin sister. “I’ve ruined her life,” Laufey jokes between bites of her chia seed and mango breakfast. “I get regular DMs being like, ‘Oh my God, I saw you at King's Cross’ and I'm like, ‘I’m in LA like that was my sister, but I love you’.”

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We’re sitting on the rooftop of Soho House in London’s hipster paradise Shoreditch, where Laufey has been booked for back-to-back meetings. Much like her music, the artist herself is a medley of styles, wearing a thrifted Ralph Lauren silk skirt paired with Carrel Mary Janes and a navy knit cardigan. She carries herself with the laid-back ease of a California girl, the eclectic dress sense of a French ingénue and the practical humility of an Icelander.

Talented is the word you’d use to describe any young musician who has made it to their second album, but it still feels like an understatement for Laufey. At 24 years old, she writes her own songs, composes classical music and counts herself a grad of Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music (where she was accepted on a full scholarship, no less).

For those outside of the rarified classical music world, Berklee teaches jazz, pop and contemporary music, business and production, whereas the classical conservatories “just basically train you to be a soloist or orchestra musician,” Laufey explains. Despite the college’s gravitas, it doesn’t offer the “guaranteed” soloist orchestra gig promised by more traditional programmes. “My mother is a classical musician and you'd think that she'd be pushing me into something more traditional,” Laufey says. “But she was the one who was like, ‘no you have to go’.” It turned out to be just the place for the artist to flourish; her first ever release, a song called ‘Street by Street’ was recorded with her across-the-hall neighbour.

But “literally the day” Laufey recorded the track, Covid struck and all students were sent home. Assuming the lockdown would just be a couple of weeks, she set out to “write as much as possible”, posting videos of herself performing both “little covers of jazz standards” and original songs online. She gained a following on TikTok and the attention of a record label, to which she’s still signed today. “It was kind of a rare opportunity to spend a lot of time doing that, because it didn't feel like vacation,” she says. “It was a weird pause.” She describes her success on the platform as “the perfect storm”, in which she had time to produce the content and others had time to watch it. At the time of writing this article Laufey (pronounced Lay-vay by the way) boasts 1.3 million followers and 44.3 million likes on TikTok.

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Classical music is a rite of passage in Laufey’s family; her grandparents both taught violin in Beijing and her mother is a classically trained violinist. The first time her mother left home was to study in London. “My mother is very brave,” Laufey says. After graduating, Laufey’s mother was accepted to the Iceland Symphony and the Singapore Symphony and “for some crazy reason” opted for Iceland. Laufey’s Icelandic father spotted a picture of the young violinist in the local paper as part of a well-intentioned but not-so-woke story profiling all the foreign members of the orchestra. “That would never slide today,” Laufey says. He read the interview, “thought she was really charming”, got in touch and the rest is history; Iceland became the couple’s forever home and where they would welcome their twin daughters. “I actually only recently learned this story,” says Laufey. “It's a really sweet story.”

From age six to age nine, Laufey lived in Washington DC thanks to her father’s finance job at the IMF. When she returned to Reykjavik, it was something of a culture shock. “I had forgotten a lot of my Icelandic,” she says. Meanwhile, the financial crisis had taken hold and her father was “really busy”. “I never saw him and I was so young – I didn’t understand what was happening,” she says. “It was a heavy time.” As she puts it, Icelandic is an “unforgiving” language, one that she had lost her grasp of. “If you have even the tiniest bit of an accent, it’s quite noticeable,” she says. “I just remember feeling very foreign.” It was a sentiment echoed by the children in her community, and a feeling that followed her through middle and high school. “I felt very big and loud and too expressive and foreign and different somehow,” she says.

To combat this feeling of ‘otherness’, Laufey buried her head in music, spending as much time as possible at the conservatory. She didn’t even start dating until recently. “I went to a school where everyone was super blonde and blue-eyed and athletic and just like these gorgeous God-like versions of Icelanders,” she says. “I didn't feel like I looked like that, so I just couldn't play the game.”

Instead she was a self-confessed “orchestra nerd” who played the cello every day. “Classic Chinese mother,” she says, adding that since her mother is also a classical musician, she had extra expectations to excel musically. Laufey started on piano at four then cello when she was eight. At 13, she started singing, influenced by the jazz classics she listened to growing up: Ella Fitzgerald, Chet Baker, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong. For Laufey, vocal jazz was the “middle ground between classical music and new music that felt very familiar”.

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Her own songs are arresting, with haunting vocals that appeal to Billie Eilish devotees, smooth melodies that harken to golden-age jazz musicians and bossa nova tones akin to Amy Winehouse. The kids love it, but so do the purist classical critics. You could describe her sound as ‘jazz pop’, but it feels reductive to whittle her anachronic sound down to just one genre. Her expat mixed-race childhood makes it even more obvious why her music cannot be pigeonholed. “I think that actually plays a big part into why I'm so comfortable mixing all these different genres and being a musician today,” she says.

Her next album, due out in September, is in keeping with her classic jazz focus, modernised with lyrics that pull on the heartstrings of anyone in a ‘situationship’. Many of the lyrics are drawn from personal experience. “The nature of moving around so much is that I find myself in a lot of long-distance situations,” she says. “So a lot of my songs talk about, ‘Oh, I miss you, I’m on a flight,’ or, ‘You chose this city over me’.” Titled Bewitched, the entire album is recorded live with jazz trios and symphony orchestras and even features a classical music interlude that she “wrote on a whim”.

While she’s about to embark on a world tour, she first heads home to Reykjavik, for her Vogue shoot. Despite the challenges in her adolescence, it’s still her “favourite spot in the world”. “That is my comfy spot – the food, the swimming pool culture,” she says. “You just go and you sit there in a hot tub and chat with your friends.”

While she hasn’t gotten used to being recognised abroad, in Iceland it’s a comfortable occurrence. “My favourite coffee shop is called Reykjavik Roasters – there’s one in a gallery right by the big cathedral that is really darling and my favourite spot to go and read,” she says. “Every time I go there though, I don’t end up reading because I end up in conversation with someone that I know.”