Laufey is making a singles chart impact with her 2023 festive song Winter Wonderland – one of several Christmas songs in her catalogue. Following its new Top 20 peak this month, here's a chance to revisit our cover feature from earlier this year...
In 2025, as she launches her third album, A Matter Of Time, Gen Z sensation Laufey plans to redefine the meaning of mainstream crossover. Already a Grammy winner and TikTok star, the classically trained musician born Laufey Jónsdóttir is now setting about taking over the world. To kickstart a campaign that promises to be one of the most notable of the year, Music Week meets the singer/songwriter, plus Foundations Artist Management and AWAL, to find out how she plans to transcend classical and jazz, and climb to a new pop peak. At the centre of this whirlwind story is Laufey’s singular approach to the industry. As she says herself, “How lucky am I that what works for me is doing exactly what my heart tells me to do?”
WORDS: Niall Doherty
COVER PHOTO: Emma Summerton
PHOTOS: Nicole Mago
Laufey ticked off everything she’d ever dreamed of in 2024, the sort of phenomenal year that has required the 25-year-old to draw up a new bucket list. She won a Grammy, something that felt so outlandish for her that it never even figured in her thinking when it came to lifetime goals, and played headline shows at her all-time favourite venues (Royal Albert Hall, Hollywood Bowl, Radio City Music Hall). Tick, tick, tick.
Along the way, the artist born Laufey Jónsdóttir in Reykjavik to a Chinese mother and Icelandic father began to mull over what success actually meant. She discovered that when you’re an ambitious type, as Laufey undoubtedly is, you’re always looking for the next bigger thing.
“That’s how I got to where I am,” she says. “Once I have played the 1,000-cap venue in a city, I’m excited to play the 4,000-cap venue the next year.”
But she followed this thread and wondered, where does it end?
“I’ll hopefully be playing arenas soon,” she states. “And I don’t want to play venues bigger than an arena, so it’s going to have to stop somewhere.”
Laufey’s remarkable rise is showing very few signs of slowing down, though. She is the ultimate modern trailblazer and Gen Z superstar, someone for whom there are no clear forebears to measure herself against. There have been pop artists signed to independent labels before, but not independent pop artists whose music is rooted in ye olde world classical and jazz sounds, her music giving the Great American Songbook a new twist. No one had that down as the next big thing in pop and yet, with almost 14 million monthly listeners on Spotify and nearly 650m plays for 2023 hit From The Start – not to mention 7.8m followers and 293m likes on TikTok – here we are.
From The Start is Laufey’s biggest-selling single in the UK, with 272,494 sales according to the Official Charts Company. Beyond that, her strategy of festive releases has paid off impressively, with 2023’s Winter Wonderland (211,642 sales) and 2024’s Christmas Magic (137,412) the best performers.
“Laufey is unique in every way and that’s why there is no ceiling to where she can go,” says Lonny Olinick, CEO of her label partner AWAL. “She is such an inspiration because her vision is uncompromising, her musical talent is second to none and her work ethic is undeniable. It’s one-of-a-kind artists like Laufey who truly shape culture and stand the test of time.”
“Laufey has broken so many preconceived notions about an artist with that kind of background,” adds Sam Potts, SVP at AWAL. “Name me an artist that can have almost eight million TikTok followers, do a Radio 1 Live Lounge, record with the LA Philharmonic, sell out the Royal Albert Hall, appear at the Met Gala and is pictured alongside Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo. You couldn’t name another artist that has those sorts of credentials.”
Laufey’s success, says Max Gredinger, her manager and a partner at Foundations Artist Management, represents what he calls “the complete diminishment of the niche”.
“For so long, the implication has been that niche is small,” he says. “But you see there’s multiple nights of Dungeons & Dragons live performances sold out at Madison Square Garden. When we talk about niche, we’re not talking about small anymore.”
It’s a Wednesday morning and Laufey is at home in LA. She has been spinning plates this week, just how she likes it, pivoting from working on a new music video to doing a photo shoot for a fashion magazine. She’s in good spirits – her twin sister and creative director Junia has just arrived in town. Asked to sum up where her head is at a few months into the new year, she says, “hopeful”. She repeats it a few times out loud, just to check. Yeah, she’s happy with that appraisal. “Hopeful.”
And why shouldn’t she be? Laufey has completed work on her third, as-yet-untitled record, an expansive evolution of her sound that confidently leans into the huge breakthrough she made last year. She recently released its first single, a sweeping, orchestral number titled Silver Lining. Pre-release, she teased it on TikTok, dancing and miming along to the vocals using her Montréal Jazz Festival trophy (she won the Ella Fitzgerald Award in 2024) as a pretend microphone.
“The reason I chose it as the first single is that it’s a good example of what the album is in terms of material,” she explains. “It’s not necessarily sonically exactly the same, but it’s very much my writing.”
The track is a love song, she says, with a touch of her trademark humour to it.
“It’s about being in love but how it’s not so straightforward, how being in love doesn’t mean that all of a sudden everything is perfect and daisies. It has that vintage, reverbed-out, soul-y sound, but it’s poppier in a way.”
The song’s lyrical hook is taken from a gag she has with her friends.
“I have this joke with them where I’m like, ‘I’ll see you in hell!’” she explains. “I wanted to put that into a song and be like, ‘Even if we end up in hell, the silver lining is you’ll be there with me.’”
Laufey allowed herself to widen her sound while in the process of making the new record.
“I’ve not been as strict when it comes to exploring sounds or genres,” she reveals. “The common thread with the whole album is that it’s my experience. There wasn’t really a classic co-write and that’s the thing that brings the album together, that it’s my writing, my voice, and lots of me playing cello. The songs all have little different personalities, but they’re all the personalities that come out when you’re in love.”
A key difference in the creative process this time is that she went into it on the back of having a streaming smash in From The Start, the sort of thing that might put an artist on the path to second guessing themselves. She did harbour some initial concerns but they dissipated as she got to work on the album, the follow-up to 2023 Top 20 LP Bewitched, the record for which she won the Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal album.
“It’s weird, because I never thought I’d experience the level of success of a song like From The Start,” she reflects. “It’s not really something you expect when you go into a career making the kind of music I make. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t something that entered my mind, like, ‘How do I keep the momentum going?’ But those thoughts only affect you when you’re thinking about the album. Once I’m making the songs, those thoughts don’t affect me because I’m writing the music that I’m writing in the moment and I’m making the songs that feel right in the moment. 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. The thing is, From The Start is still my song and it’s not going anywhere, no matter what.”
When Laufey asked herself the question of how to keep a good thing going now her career had taken off, the answer she landed on was that she’d found success making music that was a direct reflection of who she is. That is what she sought to retain making her new record.
“The one thing I could do was to continue doing that because that’s what’s worked for me,” she offers. “How lucky am I that what works for me is doing exactly what my heart tells me to do?”
It’s why there aren’t many co-writes on the forthcoming album. As much as she enjoys a collaboration, she realised the songs she writes on her own in her bedroom are the ones she feels most deeply about.
“I think the fans also like them the most,” she says. “I think they can tell that there’s an honesty in them.”
That connection with her diehards, first forged when she became a viral sensation on TikTok in 2020, is key to everything she does.
“I write honestly and earnestly from the heart,” she says, considering why so many fans have jumped on board. “I think I connect with a lot of young women and young women who are often from more diverse backgrounds that maybe feel like they’ve been othered. I am, to the core, that. I grew up in a very homogeneous, Icelandic community being very different in many different ways. I think simply being one of those people and finding success and continuing to write my story is hopefully inspiring, but also proof that dreams can come true, even if it’s not something that seems super obvious.”
It’s why she’s so open and vocal about her story and life online, she says.
“When I started out on social media putting out music, I was exactly like my fans are now,” she explains. “I was just a girl who loved social media, and I love music, and I love that I have a story. I have insecurities, and I fall in love, and I fall out of love, and I sometimes believe I’ll never fall in love. I write about those things in a very honest way with a touch of sarcasm that I think Gen Z and Gen A relate to.”
Laufey is smart and switched-on company. Regarding representation and diversity in the music industry, she thinks it’s getting a little better in some areas and still lacking in others.
“There’s still leaps and bounds to go,” she says. “Like, we talk about Asian artists, for example – you get a list of Asian artists in the spotlight and everybody’s half Asian, including myself. What is that telling young Asian girls who want to be a singer?”
She describes 2025 as the “Year Of The Woman” in terms of its leading lights but says that’s not actually reflected in the streaming stats.
“I saw some lists and, at least in the States, it seems to be still heavily mostly men who are streamed, even though women are talked about the most.”
Women working in the industry, she continues, is another area that’s still lagging behind.
“Songwriters, producers, engineers… There are really, really, low numbers of women working in those fields specifically,” she says. “And when it comes to women of colour, it’s even lower.”
What’s needed, she believes, are more leaders.
“We need to support women who are already in the field to become the role models that young women need, to understand that this is something for them, too,” she adds. “I really believe in this role model thing – young women, especially young women of colour, need role models. When you’re a kid, things are so simple, you look up and you point to the person that looks the most like you, and you think, ‘I want to be just like that,’ because you see someone who looks like you and represents you.”
Despite the huge numbers she has on DSPs, Laufey no longer keeps a close eye on the figures. She used to, but then realised how much it was skewed around Christmas time – thanks to the aforementioned handful of very, very popular festive tunes. It put her off a little bit, and she started to think there might be less of a link between streaming stats and ticket and vinyl sales than she first thought.
“There’s less of a correlation between streaming numbers and interest in you as an artist, and I’m so much more interested in being an artist that people come to see live than someone who streams a lot,” she says. “I’m lucky. I own my masters. I have a really great team. I don’t look, there are too many numbers. How am I supposed to fathom a million people a day listening to my music? It’s a bad place to start.”
It was back when Laufey was a student at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College Of Music that she first learned the importance of being in charge of your own musical destiny. She’d read an interview with the British musician Bruno Major where he’d spoken about a bad experience with a major label and soon the topic became the talk of her university.
“Everyone was like, ‘Oh, if you can own your masters’ or, ‘retain creative control’, those were the buzzwords everyone was using,” she recalls. “I was just like, ‘That feels like the right thing to do.’”
Funnily enough, she became obsessed with AWAL when she was in college, submitting her music into their portal (and not getting an answer). When it came to signing a record deal, she didn’t hold it against them.
“I love everyone at AWAL so much and it was my goal,” she beams. “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.”
By that point, she’d already grown a huge social media following and had what she calls “an acute understanding of what the ears of Gen Z and my fans like and enjoyed”.
“I didn’t think that there was anybody at any label who would understand my audience and this kind of very narrow niche that I found as well as I did,” she says. “Once I met Max, my manager, he had been working with artists at AWAL for years. I was ecstatic because he has the same goals as I do and cares about me retaining creative control and retaining ownership over my music.”
AWAL SVP Sam Potts adds that Laufey has always had a clear idea of what her artistry should feel like from online and general media and marketing perspectives. The UK-based exec also says that working with AWAL gives her the space and time she needs, as well as amplification in all corners of the world.
“The way we’re set up is extremely global,” he says. “I think you take an artist like her who has Chinese heritage, Icelandic heritage but lives in the US, it resonates all around the world. It’s our job to find the fans and find the marketing levers and find the ways of communicating her music and her art individually that feel global in their ambitions, but completely local. So what we do in Southeast Asia, for example, is completely different to what we do in Iceland and what we do in North America. You have this cohesive approach, which is global in its ambition, but very nuanced and very local at the same time.”
“Laufey not only has a commitment to making records that sound unlike anything out there in the pop world right now, but also a deep determination to make incredible experiences for her fans all over the world,” says AWAL’s head of international Francesca Burton. “Her storytelling is second to none. With Laufey’s campaigns, we have always juggled the delicate balance of focusing on the macro moments, whilst paying attention to the micro elements that build to create real fandom and community. In 2025, we are doing this on a whole new scale.”
Manager Gredinger says the new record will be Laufey’s “coming-out party”, a big leap up from anything she’s done before.
“On the touring side, we’re really ambitious,” he states. “We have a really robust plan on some of her ancillary businesses, so we’re taking the real step. We’re trying to be big and bold.”
“The key factor is getting this incredible album in front of as many eyeballs and ears as possible,” adds Potts. “For the UK, that is bringing her on to mainstream radio and achieving more mainstream TV appearances, getting those bigger looks and getting her really recognised by the UK mainstream media. Her Graham Norton performance last Christmas was a big moment for us because it got her in front of that mainstream UK audience, which I think joined the dots for a lot of multi-generational viewers that will have watched that. Achieving one of those big TV looks in the UK will be really important.”
AWAL’s head of UK marketing Nathan Liddle-Hulme says 2025 presents a huge opportunity for the label to cement Laufey’s lofty standing in the UK.
“We will be extremely ambitious with all aspects of the UK campaign, with a real emphasis on her mainstream visibility and audience across a wide range of demographics,” he explains. “Everything will feel bigger and better in 2025, whilst always feeling considered. Laufey embodies this approach in everything she does and we mirror that in our partnership with her and her team.”
When she was growing up, Laufey always considered herself an abiding rule-follower.
She was, as she puts it, good at “drawing inside the lines”. But her success over the past year or so has taught her that she was more daring than she ever knew.
“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.”
Instead, Laufey has been embracing bravery.
“There have been many moments where I’m either standing up for myself or making the music I didn’t dare to make,” she explains. “I’m a very indecisive person, but when it comes to my music and my vision for me as an artist, I feel like I’ve been very decisive. I know what I want for myself.”
Similarly, she always took pride in being such an easy person to work with and be around, the artist who always said yes to everything. But there have been moments recently where she’s had to start saying no.
“It’s to protect myself, to protect my mental health, to protect my physical health,” she says. “And the no came at the price of being not super easy. It came at the price of being, not difficult, but having needs, and that really scared me, because I’ve always been easy-going.”
As someone who seemed to have a good grip on the industry even before she’d started making her own music, Laufey dislikes how hard it is to break into it, whether at artist level or on the business side.
“Even little internship roles are often taken up by people who have friends or parents in the industry and I hate that,” she declares.
When she was at Berklee, she applied for summer internships at a variety of different companies because she was studying the music business and wanted to get some experience during the summer holidays, but she barely got a response from anyone.
“Which is fine, because they get tens of thousands of applications, but I remember being like, ‘I don’t understand how to reach these goals,’” she says. “I was a full scholarship student at Berklee, I was on the Presidential Scholarship and I couldn’t even get an internship and I had straight A’s and I was at a renowned music college. But I had no way in. I was completely removed from that world… I really wish that there was a little bit more access. There are a lot of passionate people out in the world who work really, really hard, but just don’t have a way into the industry.”
This is the sort of thing, you imagine, Laufey might discuss with her pals Olivia Rodrigo and Beabadoobee when the three of them get together. Their friendship makes for quite the trio – three young women working in different genres, each with their own forward-thinking take on where pop music can go next.
Asked what unites them, Laufey has an answer straight away.
“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.”
She corrects herself.
“Well, I listen to them, I don’t listen to myself,” she continues. “My twin sister listens to all of us, our friends listen to all of us. There’s so many more layers to people than people might think – you listen to me on a sad day, you listen to Olivia on a day where you’re feeling angry, you listen to Bea on a happy day or an anxious day. I think being a woman in the industry is something that we talk about, but they’re both really real people. I really like their company. Both of them feel like people I’d be friends with if we weren’t musicians.”
Laufey thinks Gen Z can teach the music industry a thing or two about how the rules of genre no longer apply.
“Nobody listens to one genre,” she reasons. “I literally don’t know anybody who listens to one genre. You can be a fan of so many different artists at once.”
With her third album coming into view later this year, her mind turns back to what success means as she steps into the future. Laufey is thinking beyond bigger venues, beyond dazzling stats, beyond record sales.
“I hope I look back on this year and I’m just really still in love with the art and the craft of songwriting and making music,” she concludes. “No matter what happens if I get more successful, less successful, whatever, the one thing I really want to stay true is that I’m making the music I love, the music that reflects my heart and soul.”
