Laufey: About Time

“I crash out, for sure,” she says of her meteoric rise, settled in the corner of a top floor restaurant in a swanky West London hotel. She explains that she’s managed to stay grounded by finding time to be alone, with a book or a coffee, as well as going back to Iceland when she can. “Those things really remind me of who I am,” she says. “It’s so important for me, mentally, to hold on to that.”

Playing with the ends of her sequinned scarf whenever she talks, the 26-year-old has none of the pretension you might expect from a burgeoning star. Our chat comes half an hour after the global release of her recent single ‘Lover Girl’ (“speaking of crashing out!”), an airy, bossa nova tale of falling head-over-heels lifted from her new album, ‘A Matter Of Time’. “It’s definitely the most anticipation I’ve ever seen for a song before it’s out,” she grins. “People are already making a lot of TikToks with it, which is crazy.”

A week later, she kicks off a run of intimate UK church shows at London’s Union Chapel. The audience cram into the pews, wearing bows in their hair and desperately wafting hand fans (Laufey’s trip across the pond coincides with the gloopiest of London heatwaves). Her humility in the hotel restaurant has followed her on stage: when the goosebump-inducing ‘Goddess’ brings half the room to their feet (the other half are presumably wary of passing out in the heat), she responds with a nervous giggle, holding her hands up in the shape of a heart.

“I would say putting tickets on sale is more nerve-racking [than releasing singles], because you’re asking so much of people,” she says. “You’re asking for their money. You’re asking for their time and attention, their care. Their willingness to get a computer out and ask their parents or friends if they want to come with them - it’s a whole affair. So much more than just clicking a song that, if you don’t like, you don’t have to listen to, you know?” The people inside Union Chapel are certainly listening. They join in at times - particularly for her bouncing 2023 single ‘From The Start’ - but mostly they’re held in rapt silence.

But having a niche can encourage audiences to try and put you in a box. To a lot of people, Laufey is a soft girl making only soft songs; to others, she’s strictly a jazz artist, while others debate whether she can even be classed a ‘real’ jazz musician given her pop sensibilities. In reality, though, she’s unfazed by others’ verdicts. “I think everybody in the world gets perceived and pigeonholed - it’s how humans keep track of things,” she muses. “There’s so much to my discography that you can perceive me as whatever you lean towards.”

At the same time, there’s a clear sense of trying to challenge those perceptions on ‘A Matter of Time’, where Laufey found she felt empowered to take up space and be bold for the first time in her career. “I think the artist in me always wants to work against people’s expectations a little bit,” she grins. “It’s like Bob Dylan changing his music because he didn’t want to be perceived in the way that people perceived him. He’s like, ‘yeah, I’m a folk musician, but fuck you, I want to make rock and roll’. I feel that so much on this album.”

To be clear, ‘A Matter Of Time’ is not a rock and roll album. Nor is it a rap album, as Laufey joked on TikTok earlier this year. But, after opening with “the most buttoned up version of myself that everybody knows and everyone expects”, it’s an album that unfurls to reveal newer sounds that put emotion in the driving seat - suffering insecurity, angst, lust and rage in equal measure. Time - a muse that shaped earlier releases ‘Slow Down’, ‘Letter To My 13 Year Old Self’ and ‘Falling Behind’ - is the central focus. Her fascination is down to it being another thing humans cannot control, no matter how hard they try.

‘A Matter Of Time’ is “about falling in love, and how it’s just a matter of time until the person that you’re in love with finds out everything about you,” she explains. “You can’t hide your emotions from a lover. Everything will come out, and that was my discovery in the time that I was writing this album. It’s called ‘A Matter Of Time - until you find out I’m crazy’, basically.”

“I just think [Aaron] has such a unique take on music that is so instantly recognisable,” Laufey says. “I made music [with him] in a way that I’ve never made it before, and it felt different but still very true to who I was. There was just magic in it, so I thought, ‘this has to exist on this album, because it’s a snapshot of my reality right now’.” (The pair are also cosmically linked by way of both having identical twin siblings, and all sharing the same birthday - “a quadruple twin Taurus,” Laufey quips.)

Another of the album’s softer moments is found on ‘Snow White’, where letting some of her darker, scarier feelings out makes for one of the most arresting tracks on the record, if not in her discography at large. “It was just me getting all my frustrations out in a song, and it was so cathartic,” she recalls. She worried for a while about whether it was the responsible choice to release a song like this to her predominantly female audience - it’s a bleak revelation that even winning a Grammy and watching your dreams come true can’t always outshine the intoxicating allure of socially contrived beauty standards. 

“I pondered that for a while, but I realised that sometimes the best consolation you can get is just feeling seen, or feeling heard,” she notes. “I realised that art doesn’t need to be comforting, always. [‘Letter To My 13 Year Old Self’] ends with saying, ‘you’ll be beautiful and fine one day’. I just didn’t feel that in the moment, so I didn’t write it.”

Tags: Features, In Deep, Interviews, Laufey