We’re meeting to talk about her upcoming third studio album, A Matter of Time, which is out later this month. Laufey tells me it is about “the various emotions that women go through in a day”.“It’s never one thing,” she says. “I think I go through every emotion [through] every 24-hour cycle. I wanted the album to feel like that too, how quickly you can go from rage to calm.”
Four days after we speak, Laufey makes a surprise appearance on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage during Noah Kahan’s set. The duo sung his track Call Your Mom together, after he introduced Laufey as “one of the greatest voices I’ve ever heard”. Among other accolades, Laufey won a Grammy in 2024 for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. Billie Eilish is a fan, and even congratulated her just after she collected her award.
She reacalls: “I was walking in the tunnel and she was walking [towards] me and she was like, ‘Hey, congratulations.’ I was like, ‘How the f**k do you know who I am and how did you know that?’ That was really cool.” Laufey describes the feeling of winning a Grammy as “like getting a good grade on an essay”.
“It’s validation from theorists, from professionals, from teachers, it feels like,” she says. “It was really cool, and especially because I feel like I just mess around on the internet and put out music for fun. It is cool.”
This means even more to her, she explains, because she hasn’t travelled the traditional road when it comes to a pop artist’s career, or a jazz musician’s. “To get that validation from the people who adhere to those [traditional] pillars, it was really, really cool.”
Laufey and her fans have dubbed this year Lover Girl Summer (a rather different beast to Charli XCX’s 2024 Brat summer), inspired by her single, Lover Girl. “I think during the summer everyone should take on a lover girl mindset, which to me is just a form of optimism and seeing everything through a romantic lens,” she explains.
Love has been on Laufey’s mind since the beginning of her career, with her 2022 debut album appropriately named Everything I Know About Love. When I ask her if we can ever truly know anything about love, she responds “I don’t think so. All of my albums are just really research on love and love in life. I think what I’ve learned about love now and what A Matter of Time really explores is how much you learned about yourself while you fall in love, and how many of your flaws will come out.
“Basically, the thesis of A Matter of Time is that you cannot hide a single part of yourself from the person that you fall in love with.” I tell her that, at times, I’ve seen perhaps the absolute worst of myself from falling in love. She agrees, stating it brings out “all of your trauma. I thought I was trauma free.”
Given the swoony, croony nature of her music, I ask Laufey if she herself is a romantic. Her response is “of course”. “When you grow up in a place like Iceland, you are forced to see the world through a romantic lens,” referring to the long, cold winters. Laufey tells GLAMOUR that she channeled that romantic vibe through music and watching romcoms – her favourite being When Harry Met Sally. She adds that 90s romcoms were much more “unserious” due to the fact that they weren’t subjected to the same online discourse that romcoms are on social media and other areas of the internet right now.