The ‘Is Laufey jazz?’ question is one that’s been asked ever since the Icelandic singer-songwriter first broke through on TikTok in 2020, but with a new single out and a third album on the way, the woman herself seems less concerned with being put in a box than ever.
And it’s hardly surprising. Aged 25, Laufey is slap bang in the middle of a generation that seemingly puts less emphasis on genre and musical boundaries than any other.
“Nobody listens to one genre,” she tells Music Week. “I literally don’t know anybody who listens to one genre. You can be a fan of so many different artists at once.”
This comment came after Laufey, whose mother is Chinese, was asked what she has in common with two of her friends and peers, Olivia Rodrigo and Baebadoobee.
“Well, we’re all Asian girls around the same age who write about boys!” she laughs. “But it’s a very good example of a Gen Z woman, or a Gen Z listener. I could easily find a person that listens to all three of us, even though we’re so extremely different. I’m one of those people.”
Appropriately, it sounds like Laufey’s third album will take her further outside her ‘trad jazz’ safe space than ever before. She says that recent single Silver Lining - which got its live debut at Coachella at the weekend - is “a good example of what the album is in terms of material,” adding that “it has that vintage, reverbed-out, soul-y sound, but it’s poppier in a way.”
This doesn’t mean that she’s become more commercially minded in her writing, though. “I’ve never sat down and been like, ‘I’m gonna write a pop hit today,’ that’s not a mindset that I wanted to get used to,” she claims.
Instead, Laufey says that the lesson that she’s taken from writing her third album is that she doesn’t have to restrict herself. “I have more of a capacity to step outside the lines and break rules than I thought,” she says. “I’ve found that drawing inside the lines doesn’t really create the kind of artist that I look up to.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Laufey discusses the lack of female representation in technical roles in the music industry. “Songwriters, producers, engineers... There are really, really, low numbers of women working in those fields specifically,” she points out. “And when it comes to women of colour, it’s even lower.”
She also says that, right from the time when she was a student at the Berklee College Of Music, she felt that it was important for her to own her masters and retain creative control.
“There are artists who go into the music industry who have no clue what a master even is and I was so aware of a song being something that I created, and it felt wrong to pass it off to someone else,” she explains.
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