Laufey: this Gen Z Karen Carpenter is going to be huge
Meet jazz’s answer to Taylor Swift. The 24-year-old Iceland-Chinese singer-songwriter Laufey Lín Bing Jónsdóttir (known simply as Laufey, pronounced Lov-vey) marries Gen Z lyrical wryness to the song structures and nimble rhythms of the Great American Songbook, like a cross between Astrud Gilberto and Billie Eilish.
In a prim yet hip Mary Quant style check dress and white blouse combo, long dark hair falling neatly over her shoulders, Laufey looked like she might have stepped daintily out of a 1960s easy-listening TV show to bring her retro jazz pop to EartH, the elegantly battered auditorium in East London. Spotlit on a decorously arranged stage, everything about her cute act is so precisely calibrated it might verge on parody if Laufey herself wasn’t so obviously enthralled by her oeuvre and determined to squeeze something fresh from it.
Older listeners may wonder why a modern pop star is dressing like a young Nana Mouskouri, singing like a more jazz inflected Karen Carpenter and leading her band in harmonies reminiscent of the Andrews Sisters, but her devoted young (and mainly female) audience are responding to beautifully constructed songs that unpick love, longing and modern dating with forensic sharpness. “I didn’t call you / For 16 long days / And I should get a cigarette / For so much restraint,” (from her song Promise) is a verse of bittersweet romance worthy of Hoagy Carmichael, tied up with an aching chorus that Frank Sinatra might have sold his weary soul for: “It hurts to be something / It’s worse to be nothing / With you.” Her audience sang softly along with quiet reverence, as if afraid to break a spell.
Between songs, Laufey’s patter was dryly amusing. She introduced a rare upbeat song that did not address romantic disaster by noting: “This one’s a love song. I know what you’re thinking: she does those? Well, apparently I do.”
She was backed by a seven-piece band, whilst Laufey herself moved expertly between guitar, piano and cello – an instrument on which she has performed as a soloist with the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. Classically trained, with a scholarship from Berklee College of Music in Boston, Laufey has found a brilliant way to channel her old-fashioned musical tastes for a contemporary listenership. Her ascent has been dizzying. She’s already gone viral on TikTok and won a Grammy Award this year for Best Pop Vocal Album for her debut Bewitched and will be back for a sold-out Royal Albert Hall show in May.
Her version of jazz is restrained and not remotely progressive, with only a couple of rumbling interludes between drummer and bassist to suggest there is any freedom in the music at all. But Laufey is still young, her songwriting is outstanding, her musical abilities dazzling, her personality winning, and on her zeitgeist-riding trajectory it seems unlikely we will see her in venues as intimate as this ever again.
Performing at EartH again tonight and on Saturday; then the Royal Albert Hall on May 16; laufeymusic.com
