Laufey Is Bringing Jazz Traditions to a New Generation

There’s only one singer in the world who has their jazz scat solos sung back at them note-for-note by arenas filled with adoring fans. That would be Laufey, a Gen Z artist who transcends genre and medium. The Icelandic 25-year-old (pronounced Lay-vey, full name Laufey Lin Bing Jonsdottir) draws inspiration from Ella Fitzgerald recordings, Schubert impromptus, and Taylor Swift bridges; she excels performing alongside solemn symphony orchestras as well as in lighthearted TikTok videos. While her untraditional approach has engendered backlash from genre gatekeepers, Laufey has learned to embrace opposition.

“I used to think that was such a scary thing: that nobody had walked that trail before me,” she says, taking a break from recording her upcoming third studio album in New York City. “But I now realize that when you’re the one determining which steps to take next and which branches to pull to the side, that’s when you know you have something good on your hands.”

Laufey’s music most closely aligns with the Great American Songbook: swinging, debonair midcentury pop written by the likes of Cole Porter and Jerome Kern. While she comes from a classical-music family and learned to play classical piano and cello at an early age, she veered toward jazz standards as a teenager. “The Great American Songbook is my bible,” she says. At the Berklee College of Music in Boston, a hotbed for rising jazz prodigies, Laufey honed a singing voice tailor-made for the genre: low, rich, and honeyed, with traces of Peggy Lee.

When the school sent students home in the spring of 2020, Laufey returned to Iceland and began posting videos of herself recording midcentury classics. These comforting, cozy videos drew an audience during a time when solace and escapism were badly needed. “I want people to enjoy the music without feeling like they have to be super educated on its history,” she says. “Like any other kind of music, it can be something that lifts you up or accompanies you on a sad day.”

Laufey could have turned this success into gigs on the jazz circuit, performing familiar repertoire. Instead, she started writing her own material: songs in the style of those old standards, but imbued with modern slang and conveying big, relatable feelings, especially the throes of unrequited love. “Listening to you harp on ’bout some new soulmate/ ‘She’s so perfect,’ blah, blah, blah,” she sings on “From the Start,” which now has 600 million streams on Spotify. “How I wish you’ll wake up one day/ Run to me.”

With their counterintuitive mix of influences and nostalgic quality, Laufey’s songs earned her fans of all ages, but especially Gen Z. On TikTok, she has displayed a cunning social media fluency, posting acoustic versions of pop songs, outfit pics, and memes to her 7 million followers. Her dance moves were imported into the video game Fortnite, and she’s made fast friends with other Gen Z rebels like Olivia Rodrigo and Beabadoobee. “There are a lot of young women who connect with each other—and me—through this feeling of being the outcast,” she says.

She’s also thrived performing in front of audiences who love orchestra arrangements and earned the plaudits of older artists who have also blended jazz and pop, like Norah Jones and Jon Batiste. Last year, she won her first Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album, typically a stodgy category, for Bewitched.

Laufey’s rapid ascent has led some to anoint her as jazz’s savior. This, in turn, has angered jazz musicians who feel she isn’t doing enough to engage with the genre’s varied history or boundary-pushing present. Laufey brushes off both the crown and the criticism. “That’s where things have gotten convoluted—people saying I’m the ‘savior of jazz.’ I don’t consider my music jazz. I record jazz standards, I can be a jazz singer, but 90% of what I put on my albums is not jazz music,” she says.

Conversely, she fiercely defends her bona fides and her right to engage with a genre that often feels like it has protective walls around it. “I think it’s really easy to point at a young woman and say she doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” she says. “But I know I’ve studied this enough to understand exactly what it is.”

While Bewitched relied on classical and acoustic instruments, Laufey says her upcoming record will be more “daring,” mix genres more fluidly, and expand her sonic palette with newer sounds. “I want to see if I can keep the integrity of my music but also allow myself to try out a bit of what modern technology allows,” she says.

Plenty of artists have gotten in trouble with their fans for expanding their sense of self and trying new modes of expression. This sort of experimentation might be especially challenging for some Laufey fans who view her music as purely a nostalgia act. But if there’s anything she has learned in the past few years, it’s the importance of refusing to be boxed into categories. “The fact that the jazz and classical worlds seem to struggle with the idea of an artist being both commercially successful and musically interesting—it breaks my heart a little,” Laufey says. “Why can’t I be both?”