Laufey Is Throwing Away the Rule Book

Icelandic-Chinese jazz-pop sensation Laufey refuses to be boxed into one thing. Ahead of the Asia leg of her A Matter of Time tour, Laufey talks about existing in the in-betweens, throwing away the rule book, and creating music that reaches beyond herself.

A hand pops up from the bottom of the screen. “I’m here!”

The camera wobbles, catches a patch of bright ceiling light, then, with the help of multiple hands, drops low enough to find Laufey in a white robe and pink rollers, smiling from the glam chair. It is the middle of the night in Manila, but she arrives through the call with all the energy of a Los Angeles afternoon. On set for her first shoot withVogue Philippines, she is exactly as chipper as she was the last time we spoke. “Hi!” she says, almost sings.

Nearly a year ago, Vogue Philippines caught Laufey just before her third studio album, A Matter of Time, came out. She had just returned from Japan then, where she filmed the music video for “Lover Girl,” one of the album’s tracks. “I’ve just been running around, doing the thing, the musician thing,” she joked coyly.

She, in fact, still is doing “the musician thing,” only now on an even grander scale: in Los Angeles after six months of touring North America and Europe for her album tour, and fresh off her second consecutive Grammy win. Just two months before our conversation, the 26-year-old took home Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album for A Matter of Time, following her 2024 win for her sophomore album Bewitched, which made her the youngest artist to receive the award. Even then, Grammy coverage noted that her music had already amassed billions of streams, an almost absurd statistic for a genre once dismissed as niche or retro. It’s a far cry from livestreaming jazz standards in her bedroom, and Laufey is only gaining momentum.

As blush is pressed into place, her face lights up. “Can I spoil something?” she leans in, before launching into what was then still under wraps. Just days earlier, she had been on another set (this time by a pool, in a house overflowing with Asian snacks and boba) to film the music video for “Madwoman,” one of four new tracks from the deluxe edition of A Matter of Time: The Final Hour. These tracks serve as the record’s “closing chapter,” extending an already intimate body of work she previously described as her most revealing yet. 

Fittingly, to star in the video, she brought together a group of fellow mixed-heritage figures across pop culture, including KATSEYE’s Megan Skiendiel, The Summer I Turned Pretty star Lola Tung, Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu, and Hudson Williams of Heated Rivalry. Or, as she calls it, the “Wasian Avengers.” Tinged with the groove of the 1960s, the Warren Fu-directed music video is steeped in vintage glamour and the kind of theatrics that have come to define this era’s twisted fairytale quality. The title alone points to one of Laufey’s richest threads as an artist: the insistence that women be allowed complexity, even a touch of madness, without being reduced by it. Recalling the meal they shared afterward, she adds, “It genuinely felt like being at the diner after a musical or a show we watched together. It was so much fun, and we talked a lot about growing up and feeling like we were trapped between cultures.”

If feeling trapped between cultures was once a source of tension, it has since become one of Laufey’s great strengths. This, perhaps, is exactly what has carried her to the stars: how naturally she has made a home of the in-between. 

“I think that’s one of the reasons I love Filipinos so much,” she interjects. “Whether it’s literally being in the Philippines or among all the Filipinos around me in the States… I feel like that mix just makes you such a self-aware person somehow, and I always connect with Filipinos because of that. I feel like we just all are a concoction of so many different cultures.”

Born to an Icelandic father and Chinese mother, she was raised in Reykjavík in a home steeped in music: her mother was classically trained, her father was an avid jazz listener, and her grandparents were music educators, too. She later moved to the United States for Berklee College of Music, where she came of age and began making music that also refuses neat classification.

Before becoming one of the most recognizable young musicians working between jazz, bossa nova, classical, and pop, Laufey was a curly-haired kid with glasses in Iceland who often felt like an outcast. What changed was not that the feeling disappeared, but that she learned how to move with it. It’s what makes Laufey so compelling to a generation that has grown to reject traditional labels in favor of fluidity and authenticity.

Her first step in that journey, she says, was choosing a less traditional musical path: committing to Berklee instead of a classical conservatory. Even then, she recalls being terrified by the prospect of betting on herself. Despite a full-ride Presidential Scholarship in hand, “I was so scared of jumping into the deep end of becoming a musician,” she says. “I was super hesitant because I didn’t think that these kinds of things happened to me.” Her mother was the one who insisted she take the chance: “You owe it to yourself to try. You have to take a bet on yourself.”

And she did: “It was like the floodgates for rule-breaking opened all at once,” Laufey recalls. “In the first few weeks of classes, I had to relearn the rule book. Or rather, throw it away entirely.”

On the surface, what many people see when they think of Laufey is the fantasy and the whimsical world-building. But none of that exists without grit and guts. “I think people get a lot of things wrong about me,” Laufey laughs. “I think people think I’m quite quiet and soft spoken and just a whimsical girl who sits and reads all day, but I’m loud. I curse. I honestly feel not that prim sometimes. I think also people love to box me in as one or another thing.”

At that, she turns to her twin sister, Junia, seated just out of frame. “Junia, is there something I’m missing here? This is such a wonderful window of opportunity!” Junia, her artistic director (“the visual architect to my world,” as Laufey puts it), takes a beat before answering. “I think you said it. You are so much more emotionally diverse than people think.”

“I have a blazing fire within me, in many different ways,” Laufey agrees. “I cannot and will not be rolled over. I am no pushover and very much stand my ground.”

That tension may be the daily work of being Laufey: how to keep her head in the clouds while keeping her feet firmly on the ground. “That’s my daily fight: how to find confidence without it being ego and how to question myself and challenge myself without it being debilitating insecurity. It seeps into everything I do.”

And the way through, Laufey says, is making sure her art isn’t just self-serving. “I look out into my audience and I see just a ton of young, impressionable women, and I feel the weight of needing to show up as both inside and out the best version of myself because I know that they are looking to me.”

She continues, “I remember being young and looking to any artist, that if they embrace their natural bodies and faces and curly hair, I could cling on to hope that that would mean that I could also [embrace] mine. I am in that position of power. So, I’m going to do everything in my power to embolden them to do the same.”

That spirit spills straight into the A Matter of Time tour, which appears to have emboldened her, too, into scale. Arriving in Manila this May as the only city on this leg where she is playing three shows, it’s a flurry of theatrics: there are costume changes, dancers, movement, a string quartet, a “jazz club” section. 

The production draws from ballet and opera, musicals like An American in Paris, and Lady Gaga. Of Gaga in particular, she is unambiguous, mentioning a concert she saw of the pop star that she found “so inspiring because I could tell she didn’t hold back in any way.” At the start, she worried that audiences might look at the dancers and staging and wonder why a so-called jazz singer was doing all this. “But I feel like seeing the Gaga concert really emboldened me to just put on the magical show that I wanted to because I feel like I’m now getting to be  exactly the artist I’ve wanted to be.”

“I honestly have never cared more about being myself this year than before,” Laufey proudly adds. “I find the most strength in being me.”

The show then becomes a stage for her and her audiences to come as their most authentic selves, where taking up space is the point. On the tour, fans arrive already dressed for her universe, waiting for the curtain to rise. “I wanted it to feel like you were going to the theater. I wanted a stranger to walk in and just enjoy it from start to finish,” she says. “And my audience members are there, they’re quite a lot of teenagers, young people going through so much continuous change. I know everyone has something going on in their lives. So to be able to come in and forget that for a moment is all I want to do. I want to create that feeling.”

Every night, Laufey chooses an audience member as “best-dressed” and ceremonially crowns them on stage. “I’m truly expecting it to be some of the best,” she notes of her shows here. “I just know Manila is going to be like every person put the effort in.”

She adds, “I just hope that the women in my audience, and the men, too,” she says, picking it back up. “I hope that they can feel that they can be amazing and hot and beautiful and fashionable in their own skin.” Behind her, hairstylist Daniel Kim briefly looks up from curling and cuts in: “I feel it everyday!”

The older she gets, the less interested she seems in tightening herself into a single story: Chinese and Icelandic. Classical and pop. Delicate and forceful. Romantic and unruly. 

And maybe that is why the audience finds her the way it does. Not because she arrives fully resolved, but because she does not. Not even that she has arrived at certainty, but that she has become willing to move without it. Maybe that is the real rule she is throwing away: the old idea that seriousness must be austere, that femininity must be pliant, that heritage must be visually corrected, that romance must be embarrassed, that genre must behave, that young women must make themselves smaller to be taken seriously.

By the time the call ends, nearly an hour has passed. Her hair has been curled and coiled into place, closer now to the natural texture she has learned to claim more publicly this year. Laufey has built a career by refusing those terms. She has done it in curls and tulle, in jazz phrasing and internet virality, in old standards and new anxieties, in songs that sound inherited and freshly wounded at once. She has done it while carrying her history on her face and her training in her hands. She has done it while learning, publicly and in real time, to trust the scale of her own imagination.

The rule book, in other words, never stood much of a chance. 

By BIANCA CUSTODIO. Photographs by DANIEL JACK LYONS. Deputy Editor: Pam Quiñones. Beauty Editor: Joyce Oreña. Art Director: Jann Pascua. Styling: Leith Clark. Makeup: Audur Jonsdottir. Hair: Daniel Kim. Vogue Philippines Producer: Bianca Zaragoza. Executive Producer: Alexey Galetskiy. Producer: Ivan Shentalinskiy. Photography Assistants: Kurt Mangum and Sabrina Victoria. Director of Photography: Marty Rush. Fashion Associate: Neil de Guzman. Multimedia Artist: Mcaine Carlos. Styling Assistant: Molly Stack. PA & Studio Manager: Justin Barahona.

Shot on location at AGPWest.