Throughout the mid-20th century, countless legendary jazz musicians — from Billie Holiday to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington — have performed at New York City's Town Hall. But across two nights in early November, the storied venue was packed full with Gen-Zers, eager to see their generation's biggest emerging jazz star: a young Icelandic-Chinese musician named Laufey, who has blown up on TikTok for her fanciful love songs that merge jazz stylings with classical music and pop standards.
Since finding an unexpected online audience during the pandemic, 24-year-old Laufey, born in Reykjavik and now based in Los Angeles, has become a bridge between modern pop and these "antiquated" genres. After touring Asia and Australia throughout 2023, she wrapped up the sold-out North American leg behind her new sophomore album, Bewitched, earlier this winter.
Not only has Bewitched taken Laufey across the world with a slew of sold-out Europe dates already slated for early 2024, but it has also marked a before and after in her career. The project scored a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album, a category typically dominated by the likes of Michael Bublé and Tony Bennett. "It's one thing to put music out online, but there's nothing that replaces people actually showing up to concerts," Laufey tells Teen Vogue from on the road, a couple of days before her NYC shows. "It's really special."
Channeling the charm of a '40s starlet, Laufey captivated the NYC crowd with her dreamy alto, which she masterfully commanded while rotating between guitar, cello, and piano. "No boy's gonna be so smart / As to pierce my porcelain heart / No boy's gonna kill the dreamer in me," she sang from Bewitched's "Dreamer," adding elegant hand gestures to punctuate her determined words. Fueled by the cinematic quality of her nostalgic palette, Laufey's songs are filled with a kind of grandeur and optimism that her fans would lovingly call "delulu."
"Delulu's a funny word, but at the end of the day, I think it means that we're all just quite hopeful," Laufey says. "It's a hope that things will just get a little bit better or that something really remarkable is out there. It's about seeing the beauty in something not that great. I think that's what brings the Laufey community together. It's a lot of people who are, funnily enough, hopeless romantics. But the core of that is believing in something that's almost unrealistic."
While on her global tour, Laufey was amazed to see that, even across continents, her core listenership tends to be made up of the same kind of people. They're respectful listeners and a community of musicians who know "when to be loud, when to give some space and silence, and when it's appropriate to shout things out," she explains. Even during one-off gigs with internationally esteemed orchestras, she's discovered fans among the players. "Orchestras are so professional that I'll never know until literally right before the show or afterward. They'll be like, 'By the way, I love your music.'" The wildest requests from her usual fans are just them wanting her to sign their instruments; after one audience member brought their trumpet for her to embellish, it sparked others to follow suit.
"Thankfully and honestly, I feel like my fans all have good grades in school," Laufey adds with a smirk and a laugh. “I see kids doing their AP homework in line, and I'm like, 'You sweet babies!' I know what's on the cusp of their mind, just from personal trauma. I just want to hug them all and be like, 'Don't worry, you'll be fine. I know you all want to go to Brown, but you don't have to.'”
Signaling her international "it girl" status, many of her fans also show up attempting to replicate her style, which they have lovingly dubbed "Laufeycore." Laufey herself, who describes her looks as "a mix of French and Scandinavian style," has acknowledged how well-dressed her fans are on TikTok, as they come to her concerts with their long prairie skirts, puffy sleeve white tops, leather blazers, stockings, vintage dresses, and silver nails. Her followers get a double dose of inspiration from "twin fit checks" that Laufey posts, starring herself and her twin Junia, who is also her creative director. Embodying Laufeycore has even extended to doing the singer's favorite activities, like visiting a local bookstore or going to the farmer's market, as encouraged by Laufey as part of her #AVeryLaufeyDay campaign.
"I think [Laufeycore is] similar to my music, so timeless with maybe a little bit of an edge, which is actually maybe a little girly," Laufey explains. "It's a lot of classic pieces, vintage jeans, cardigans, a lot of ribbons. For shoes, it's loafers, Mary Janes, and ballet flats."
For the tour, Laufey worked with her stylist Amanda Lim to put together a rotating wardrobe of eight outfits that represent an "elevated version" of her everyday style. There are Thom Browne "school looks," like the one she rocked in NYC, and Sandy Liang to satisfy her bow cravings. They put together a few "special" ensembles for certain cities, so the designers ranged from Chanel and Adeam to Tory Burch, as well as an Oscar de la Renta dress. For makeup, she likes to go "pretty simple," focusing on a few products — namely a good tinted moisturizer and mascara and lip color from Ilia — to achieve something very "blushy, glowy, and kind of clean." She elaborates, "I'm inspired by girls in Iceland, who tend not to wear very much makeup and are tasteful with the way they go about it."
Once her minimal makeup is finished, Laufey is ready to walk on stage. She never gets nervous before gigs, a result of an early childhood of performing classical music. "It doesn't faze me very much," she explains. "Competitions were a little tougher when I was a kid because it had the added touch of judgment, but the kind of music I make now, it's like the mistakes are part of it." As a pre-show ritual, she takes a moment of silence to herself and brushes her teeth as "something that resets me," she says. "I tend to forget lyrics, so sometimes I'll Google my own lyrics, like two seconds before I go on." After she finishes every night, she likes to have something sweet — a piece of chocolate or a cookie — text her parents, and go to sleep early.
As she's ascended, Laufey has seemed to usher in a growing acceptance of jazz and classical among younger artists to tell more theatrical stories. Just this past year, she lent her voice and string arrangements to songs with Reneé Rapp, d4vd, and Norah Jones, and infused bossa nova into "A Night to Remember," her new smoldering single with Beabadoobee. As two like-minded female artists, the collaboration was "so amazing and easy," Laufey says. “What I admire about her as a musician is that she dares to have her own sound, and she's very honest in her music.”
On “A Night to Remember,” Laufey and Beabadoobee set out to "show a kind of sexier, moodier side of us, and be a little more surprising," Laufey elaborates. “I write a lot about guys rejecting me, and I wanted to reclaim the narrative. I was like, 'What if we're the ones who just spend one night with a guy and say, not again.' I think that kind of behavior can often be read as being vain or too much, even though if a guy were to do that, it would just be another song.”
With Laufey shifting the landscape of pop with her musicianship and increasingly bold songwriting, does she think she's achieved her oft-touted goal of bringing jazz to her generation? "I don't think my work is nearly done there," she answers without hesitation. “I think I've just scratched the surface. I want to do projects that lean more into jazz, maybe lean more into classical, and also continue on the path that I'm on right now. I think that will be my guiding light till the day I die.”
