By Chi S. Tsu

London, U.K.

When Laufey walks on for her headline show at the Lafayette in London on a November night, she says to the crowd in her signature, honeyed, crystal-clear alto—“Can we come closer?”

Arrayed onstage behind her are half a string quartet, a drummer, and a keyboardist, all of them cast under jewel-toned lighting that alternates shining blue, lavender, and green hues. Laufey is the luminous core of this arrangement, and will spend the next hour and a half ricocheting between the guitar, cello, keyboard, and the upright microphone at the front of the stage.

She smiles at the crowd and makes a little come-hither gesture, inviting them to fill up the remaining small gap between the stage and the audience standing room. Despite how packed the venue is, it’s clear that it’s adoration and shyness that keep so many of Laufey’s fans holding back from closing the last few inches of space. So many of these watchers are young teens and twenty-somethings who are used to seeing her on a screen rather than real life. Many have brought little offerings that, throughout the show, they will toss up at her, little stuffed animals or other creations like, for instance, a custom guitar strap hand-embroidered with all of Laufey’s favorite record covers hand-embroidered. And all of us, newcomers to her sound and old fans alike, are caught and held fast when she starts to sing, as if the one-of-a-kind lower-range sweetness, mature-sounding resonance, and built-in aching nostalgia hold us fast in amber, making time slow down to a stop, so all we can do is listen.

Known in the music world mononymously, Laufey’s full name is Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir, and, at age 23, she is credited with injecting a breath of fresh, Gen Z air into old-style jazz. Hailing from Iceland, she grew up between Washington D.C. and Reykjavik, raised by a classical violinist mother who came over from Guangzhou.

The day before her show, in a small meeting room within London’s Sony Music offices, Laufey tells me that this classical music-oriented upbringing was the key that unlocked her current musical life. She proceeded through acquiring styles and instruments in a fairly orderly fashion, from violin at four and cello at eight, to singing at 13. Her turn to vocalization allowed her to discover the genre that she loved the most and that continues to define her career now.

“I really loved jazz. It felt like this middle ground between new music and old music,” she says. But she still insists that the classical upbringing was monumental to her journey. “I’ve tried my best to implement classical inspiration and sounds, like strings, woodwinds, and other melodies into my music. A lot of cello.”

She shares her classical music background with her twin sister, Junia, who joins her onstage as an accompanying violinist. During ‘Best Friend,’ a song that Laufey composed in honor of Junia, the two sisters both stand alongside each other and duet, with Junia playing a violin tune that is answered by Laufey on the electric guitar. It's funny ‘cause you drive me half-insane, Laufey sings. A universe without you would be thoroughly mundane.

Though Laufey had at first expected to go to a classical conservatory, she instead became enamored with the prestigious Boston-based Berklee College of Music. “There are not many schools like Berklee around, with a focus on all genres of music,” she explains. “I was very excited, but also a bit scared.” The path to a musical career no longer seemed as linear: “It opened up this world of ‘no rules’—in classical music, there are so many rules.”

When I ask her what she means specifically by ‘rules,’ Laufey relates her feelings of being hemmed in by the straitlaced nature of classical music education.

“I always felt like I needed to do what was correct. Please the professors, please the crowd… Prove my worth,” she says of the classical music world. “When I started ignoring those principles a little bit—’I can place that chord there’—everything was okay. So, the nerdiest rule-breaking you’ll ever hear about. But I broke some life rules, too. I started breaking rules all over the place, and life got infinitely better.”

Work on her recorded music started just before the pandemic hit. Her first EP, lauded by superstar peers such as V from BTS and Billie Eilish, was released in 2021, the same year she graduated from Berklee, and is titled Typical of Me. Her follow-up full debut album, Everything I Know About Love, was released in August 2022 to general acclaim. Laufey’s meteoric rise can also be credited to her fluency with social media and her community-building among Gen Z, especially.

“I’ve gone into this project with the goal of introducing classical and jazz to new, younger audiences,” she says. “Reframing it as something for everybody. I am highly aware that it's music that feels like it's not accessible to a lot of people. It feels a little gate-kept for a certain academic crowd, or for those who’ve studied it. I want to take away that idea—I want classical music and jazz music to survive and continue to grow new life.”

On social media, such as TikTok, Laufey often hosts live sessions for her fans, shares smaller snippets of work and covers, and even leads her own monthly book club. Involving fellow young people in her work is a priority, she tells me. “It’s always been like, if you sing jazz music, it’s for ‘the older crowd,’” she says. “I was a little bit worried that people wouldn't really understand. I was also worried that I'd be pigeonholed in the jazz world a little bit.”

The overwhelmingly positive reception of her releases offset many of those anxieties.

“It’s so fun,” she says. “Because I don’t think about that at all anymore. I think the music industry is heading in a [direction where] it’s just less and less about genre and more about [individual] artists or feeling.”

A little over halfway through her live London set, Laufey introduces the song that she told me the day prior was her favorite song to perform live—‘Above a Chinese Restaurant.’ During the song’s outro, she sets her electric guitar aside and picks up her cello, launching into a bold and emotive solo. Amid other songs that strike devastatingly personal tones, ‘Above a Chinese Restaurant’ is premised on moments from the life of a fictional couple living in a Chinatown.

“I just wanted to write a song about dumplings,” she tells me and then the crowd the next day in London. “As a nod to my heritage.”

A cursory glance around the concert venue does show that a plurality of Laufey’s audience-members tends to skew Asian. Laufey says that she thinks about her own Chineseness as intersecting with her music a great deal, especially as principles of devotion for music-making that were brought into her life through the Chinese side of her family. She reveals to me that many members of her Chinese family have been musicians, such as her grandfather, who was a notable violinist and educator at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Her mother grew up during the Cultural Revolution, a time when classical music education faltered in China.

“My grandparents were professors of piano and violin at the Central Conservatory,” Laufey tells me. “They weren't allowed to play Western classical music during the Cultural Revolution. They were considered the bourgeois class, so they went to reeducation camps. My mother grew up in an orphanage/boarding school situation, without her parents.” She has come to understand the privilege she has in being able to incorporate different sounds into her music. “Nobody’s telling me not to do that. I'm still very close to my grandmother, and she lived through a large part of her life where she couldn't play Chopin. My mother always says to me, ‘You're so lucky that you can play whatever music you want.’”

And mix sounds she does: Laufey has put a bedroom pop spin on an older jazz sound. When I ask about the premise of her album, Everything I Know About Love, she admits to me, “I haven’t really been properly in love.”

This is ironic along multiple lines. Almost every song that she has put out seems to engage with the subjects of romance and relationships in some way, shape, or form, along with all of their constituent charming, silly, or heartbreaking experiences. The song ‘James,’ for instance, which Laufey performs live with giggles, documents a failed first-date with a self-absorbed finance guy.

However, she follows up her statement by saying, “I’m very in love with life.” This rings true, too. The peace that she has found through her love for the creative process and her family and friends around her readily aid her lyrical skill in storytelling about love and loss.

To other creators, Laufey has encouraging words for making the most out of the direct connection with an audience that the Internet can provide. “Getting to use the internet as a bridge to get into this world was really, really special,” she says. “It's hard, especially when you're young and you're in high school or college. Maybe you feel embarrassed posting something on the Internet, because your friends will see. But it becomes less embarrassing the more followers you have.”

As we wind down our conversation, we swap book recs. Laufey draws from her own book club, which read Shanghai Girls by Lisa See in November, and I recommend Madeleine Thien’s jaw-dropping opus Do Not Say We Have Nothing—I figure she would like the way Thien portrays classical musicians in twentieth-century China. Laufey admits that generational distance between herself and her grandparents has created a cultural obstacle. “I feel like it's my duty to learn about it,” she says of the stories of her grandmother’s generation.

According to Spotify Wrapped, which came out a month after our meeting, Laufey’s listener base rose from 1.8 million to 8.8 million in the last year alone. As someone who’s trying to introduce and clearly succeeding at introducing more listeners to jazz, where does Laufey think jazz is headed? “This is an incredibly biased opinion, because it’s my life’s work,” she tells me with a smile. “But I think jazz is coming back.”