With the release of her third album, A Matter of Time, Laufey is showing the world a new side of herself. Previously known for her wistful lyrics about unrequited crushes, the 26-year-old sings a different tune on this record: one about falling in love for the first time. “My first two albums are kind of just like, ‘Oh, I wonder what it will feel like, la di da, I’m falling behind,’” she said over a Zoom call last month, fresh-faced and cheery in the comfort of her Los Angeles home. “But this one is a lot more introspective and mature.”
Born in Iceland to a musical family (her mother is a violinist and her maternal grandparents were professors at China’s Central Conservatory of Music), Laufey (pronounced lay-vey) blends the styles of jazz, classical, bossa nova, and contemporary pop with a precision that goes well beyond just “la di da.” A multi-instrumentalist who plays cello, piano, and guitar, she calls the canon of the Great American Songbook her “bible.” So much so that despite using modern-day lingo and the occasional swear word—”The proof says you’re tragic as f-ck,” she sings about a man with bad tattoos on “Tough Luck”—her music evokes a dreamy nostalgia for a bygone era. Her second album, Bewitched, took home a Grammy last year and she has easily made fans out of a who’s who of musical icons, having befriended Olivia Rodrigo and duetted with the likes of Barbra Streisand and Norah Jonas.
A Matter of Time, out today, sees Laufey at her most lyrically vulnerable and her most sonically daring. She lays bare some of her deepest insecurities on “Snow White” and recalls the time she lost herself to love on “A Cautionary Tale.” Fans may be surprised to hear “Clean Air,” a twangy ode to the “waltzy, bluesy, early country” music that she finds “romantic,” but the real shock awaits them on “Sabotage,” the album’s last track. Laufey’s signature croon—”It’s just a matter of time ‘til you see the dagger / It’s a special of mine, to cause disaster”—is punctured by frantic instrumentals that crescendo in the final minute of the song, ultimately tying the album up in one big, cacophonous bow. Falling in love, we learn, is not always pretty.
“I wanted to take this idea of beauty that’s often around my music and throw it in the fire a little bit, just for the sake of showing the complexity of female emotion… of my emotion,” she said. “I think it’s my most daunting project yet.”
TIME spoke with Laufey about finding creative freedom, her “long distance relationship” with Iceland, and the singer-songwriters she turns to for advice.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
When you announced this record, you said, “I’ve taken my diary and turned it into an album of songs.” What made you want to get so personal?
I just had the confidence to. I also fell in love for the first time, so it’s an album about that, and the self-discovery that comes with it. The whole goal of the album is to illustrate the contrast between this glass-like beauty and chaos that I feel within myself so often; that I am needing to present myself in a very pristine way, but I’m fighting some sort of chaos on the inside because I’m not letting it out. And with this album, I really just wanted to let it all out.
I think that’s very apparent on the song “Sabotage.” The instrumentals sound like the musical version of what you just described.
“Sabotage” was the first song I wrote for the album—that’s where the album title comes from, and it’s kind of the thesis. It’s about the fight between your external and your internal. It’s about the fear of sabotaging something beautiful and of another person finding out your true nature. I had a lot of fun plugging meaning into the music without actually saying words, so with those [instrumental] disturbances, I wanted to interpret anxiety and the noise in your head that kind of blurs everything out.
What is your creative process like when it comes to making music? Do you approach storytelling differently when you’re writing lyrics versus actually playing an instrument?
I always start with writing the song. I write the full song on my own—the skeleton, the structure—and then I bring it to Spencer [Stewart, the album’s executive producer], and we kind of bring it to life together. I always have ideas of how I want the final product to sound, but it’s [at that stage] that we use musical painting to really bring it to the next level. If I’m singing about flying up, we’ll find a flute or a violin that starts to trill up. When singing about something ominous, we’ll use minor chords and dissonance to really illustrate that. It’s stuff like that that makes the music really cinematic.
The single “Snow White” is about the unfair beauty standards that women are often held to. “Letter to My 13 Year Old Self,” a song from your last album, is a heartfelt message of encouragement to the version of you that grew up feeling insecure. Were you thinking about the parallels between the two songs when you were working on “Snow White”?
They are definitely both songs on self-reflection, but “Letter to My 13 Year Old Self” is extremely hopeful: it’s telling young women everywhere that they will be OK and that their drawbacks may be their biggest strengths. “Snow White” is really cynical. There’s no comfort there. But it’s a song that I wrote out of frustration for not being able to reach or achieve these standards that are set for women that tour arenas or walk red carpets. Striving for perfection is a dark, endless road because the goal posts keep moving.
I think even women who aren’t in the industry can relate to that.
We all have these impossible standards thrust upon us, and we all have those moments where we feel like the way we look is way more important than how we speak or how we address people. I often felt like I couldn’t compete in the dating scene because it felt like my body and my looks were measured way higher than my brains, and it felt like the opposite for men. I thought so much about putting this song out, because I’m aware of my position as a role model, and I’m aware of my words being listened to by young women, but I realized that sometimes feeling seen or relating to someone is the best feeling.
Are there any other musicians that you reach out to when you’re wanting to feel seen?
I love dumping my problems on Norah Jones. I don’t know what it is, I think her voice is just so comforting. Claire [Cottrill, who goes by the stage name Clairo] is incredible, I love talking to her. Olivia Rodrigo, she’s just so balanced and beautiful and kind. Conan Gray, as well. Anytime I need to get anything out of my system, Conan is the first person I call.
I saw in the album credits that Clairo provided background vocals on “Mr. Eclectic.” What was it like working with her on that track?
We had the best evening splitting a bottle of wine and singing. I respect her so much as a musician, and she honestly brought so much life to the recording, not only with her beautiful voice but also with her thoughts. We were just riffing and it made the song so much better. It was a level of freedom that I really needed at that moment—I was at the point in the album-making process where I needed [someone] to release me from my overthinking.
Your song “Forget-Me-Not” is a love letter to Iceland, and you even sing a few lines in Icelandic. What does that song mean to you?
It’s about the experience of emigrating from a country, trying to balance two cultures, and the fear of losing the one you moved away from. It’s something that really plagues me all the time. Am I Icelandic enough, now that I’ve lived away from Iceland for seven years? So I wanted to write a love letter to Iceland and tell it, ‘Sorry I had to leave to go chase my dreams.’ And I wanted to hide it within a love letter because, in some ways, it sounds like I’m singing about a person. There’s something beautiful about that to me because it kind of does feel like a long distance relationship.
In an interview last year, you talked about how you wanted to find some growth with this album while still staying true to yourself and your sound. How did you go about finding that balance?
Lyrically, I really let myself be incredibly honest and not think too much about how it was going to be read or perceived by the world. I really tried to create something unique. There are songs on it where I tried to have the most classical string writing I’ve ever had [within] a pop song. That’s something that I’ve done before, but I really just expanded on this album. I just really didn’t think too much about what box the album was going to fit into. I’ve never been able to fit into one category or another, and I didn’t want to be held back by fitting into one. So I kind of just let myself be free.
There does seem to be a lot of talk about how exactly to label your music, whether it’s jazz or pop. Does that ever get annoying?
It’s hard because I’ve never felt like one thing or another. I’ve never been Icelandic or Chinese or American. I’m always a mix of everything. I’ve never even been an individual—I have an identical twin sister—so I’ve never fit into a box. Musically, I am a jazz singer; not all my songs are jazz. I’m a classical cellist; I didn’t play a lick of classical cello on this album, but I’d fight anyone who told me I wasn’t a classical cellist. So I wouldn’t say it’s annoying, but I think it’s reductive. You’re describing all of me by just a portion of my character.
It doesn’t seem like your fans care either way.
I honestly think there’s a very small group of people who are always trying to figure it out. I hope that people are just around for the music. That was the biggest difference for this album—I didn’t think about genre. I was just like, ‘My genre is Laufey. This is a Laufey album.’
The post Laufey’s New Album Is Her ‘Most Daunting Project Yet’ appeared first on TIME.
