Exclusive: Laufey's A Matter of Time Is Her Most Revealing Work Yet

Laufey sat down with Vogue Philippines to talk about the creative process and visual references of A Matter of Time, and why this record more accurately represents who she is.

When Laufey began livestreaming jazz standards from her bedroom during the pandemic, she hardly imagined she’d one day be playing sold-out arenas and winning a Grammy. Yet in just a few short years, the Icelandic-Chinese singer-songwriter has become one of the defining voices of her generation, reviving an interest in jazz for a younger audience.

Coming of age in the spotlight, it’s easy to be boxed into one thing. Today, when people think of the 26-year-old jazz-pop singer, it’s frills and bows, sweet romantic imagery, and a certain softness she’s embodied since her breakout. But with her third studio album, A Matter of Time, Laufey intends to introduce what lies beyond the surface, both through storytelling and music that resists being pegged as any one thing.

That’s not to say she isn’t all of that: sweet, warm, and whimsical. It’s apparent even as she sits down with Vogue Philippines over Zoom, a few weeks before her album release. Laufey is in Los Angeles, freshly back from Japan where she filmed the music video for “Lover Girl,” the album’s viral third single. She enters the call with an easy laugh, dressed in a white button-down blouse with puffy sleeves and lace detailing. Enveloped in golden afternoon light, she is every bit the Laufey the world has come to know. But as our conversation turns to A Matter of Time, out August 22, it becomes clear that she’s ready, if not eager, to pull back the curtain a little more on herself.

Laufey describes every album as a “blank book of stories to write.” The overarching narrative for this new record, she says, is ultimately about self-discovery: “It’s about all the emotions that you discover within yourself when you fall in love. It’s about bearing your soul to someone for the first time, and at the same time, the album for me is kind of bearing my soul to the world.”

If her previous album Bewitched was a romantic daydream, Laufey explains that A Matter of Time depicts an “anxious Cinderella” racing against the clock: still a fairytale, but more distorted, more surreal, less delicate. “It’s not necessarily a shift,” she clarifies, noting that the album is still very much within the universe she’s established. “I think it’s just adding on to what the world knows about me. I want people to know the whole me. I don’t want them to just know a portion of me.”

“And I don’t like being pegged as something [specific],” she quickly adds. “I always want to go beyond what people believe about me.”

Likewise, Laufey refused to be shackled by any genre for this album. A Matter of Time draws from a broader palette, a “hodgepodge” of musical inspirations, including moments of country and folk, without losing its lyrical cohesion. She explains, “If I decided that every song was going to be a bossa nova or recorded with an orchestra, there would be certain songs that wouldn’t reach their full potential, and I wouldn’t be able to draw out certain emotions.”

“I just let the songs lead where it went,” the singer muses. “I wanted to let myself feel and write and live my words.” The strings, she points out, remain the throughline, connecting disparate moods and motifs across the album.

For Laufey, the creative process behind every album always begins with a concept. And for A Matter of Time, it was, well, time. “I envisioned a big clock on the cover, and me kind of in it,” she laughs. “I knew from the start that the album was going to be a little bit odd; a little Cinderella-but-electrocuted type of energy.” 

Visually, too, Laufey, along with twin sister and creative director Júnía Lín Jónsdóttir, crafted an atmosphere to match. On the mood board is a concoction of old films and ballets. They were particularly inspired by the Royal Ballet’s comedic production of Cinderella, which mixed odd humor with sweeping beauty. Other influences included Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things and the dreamlike night skies of classic Disney. The result is a world that is whimsical but warped, a marriage between beauty and absurdity.

This stark contrast is embodied in the final song on the album, “Sabotage,” which also happens to be the first track she wrote out of fourteen. “It’s the thesis for the entire album,” Laufey shares. “It’s this chaos and beauty fighting it out the whole time, which kind of shows my inside and my outside, fighting it out.”

She continues, “There’s a lyric in sabotage that goes: ‘It’s a special of mine to cause disaster.’ And not that I think that I’m causing disaster at every corner, but I feel like that kind of encapsulates what I was attempting to do in that I’ve just been trying to take up more space and allow myself to make mistakes and own it.”

As for what’s next, Laufey has said her goal is to be content with and to love her music. Coming into this new era, it’s one she feels she’s reached, describing her work as an honest reflection of who she is and the music she grew up with. “I’m just happy that I get to make the music that feels the most natural to me and that I always wanted to make, and to have that received well by people. I really still don’t take that for granted,” she reflects. “It makes me believe in bigger things. It makes me believe in luck.”

Still, Laufey says her ambitions continue to grow. Besides making music, she imagines writing a film score one day, or perhaps a children’s book. A theme song for a show. Even a full musical. But for now, her focus is on A Matter of Time, which she describes as her most revealing work yet.

The singer-songwriter is set to embark on her A Matter of Time tour later this year, and while no Asia dates have been announced yet, there is no doubt that Manila holds a special place in her heart. It was here that she played her first arena show, which she recalls to be “a magical night.” She promises to return: “I literally love the Philippines so much. I miss it every day. I’m so excited to come back, and I will come back.”

With A Matter of Time, Laufey is pulling the curtain back further than before, carving herself space for strength, for uncertainty, for mistakes. This candor reflects a broader moment in pop music, where women artists are dominating charts with unapologetic vulnerability and a sense of self. “Women writing about their own experiences and dominating charts like this just tells me that there’s so much power in coming together and relating,” she reflects. “It makes you feel it’s less scary to be in this world and it’s less scary to go through heartbreak knowing that someone’s going through something similar out there.”

By BIANCA CUSTODIO. Digital associate editor: Chelsea Sarabia.