With A Matter of Time, Laufey has Created an Album about the Chaotic Feelings of Womanhood and Growing Up

To categorize Singer and Songwriter Laufey is almost impossible.

Repeatedly, she has proven that she is in her own category in every aspect from which she is approached – she simply created her own 'Laufey category.'

She was born in Iceland in April 1999 to an Icelandic father and a Chinese mother, and was raised between Reykjavik and Washington, D.C. From Childhood on, Laufey was a musician in the making – her mother is a trained classical violinist. Her father brought her close to Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, both of whom influenced her music heavily. True to the impossibility of categorizing her, she plays Cello, Guitar, and Piano. After she performed with the Icelandic Symphonic Orchestra at just 15 years old, she was a finalist in the 2014 season of Iceland Got Talent, as well as a semi-finalist of The Voice of Iceland in 2015. With a rather classical approach to a career as a musician in front of her, she again chose her own way. She rose to fame during the Pandemic, when she decided to post one of her songs on TikTok – Like the Movies, and was especially welcomed by the audience of her generation. Through social media, she grew her audience before she signed an album deal, which gave her more creative control, since “I had a quite large audience before I signed any album deal, and it gave me complete creative control. No one’s ever told me what kind of songs I should put out because they know that I know my audience and they trust me,” she told Vogue. Her debut album, Everything I Know about Love, reached the Charts in Iceland and the United States, one of the most essential music markets. Already with this album, she chose a special topic and sang about the feeling of not having been in love but yearning for it, as well as the sense of falling behind romantically. Especially the song Dear Soulmate stood out with its classical and jazz music, while lyrically having parallels to Taylor Swift’s Lover – creating a timeless and swoony classical love ballad. With her first album, Laufey established her style, which led the New York Times to describe her as a "master code-switcher…witty earworms that paint a glamorous wonderland shaded with the second-guessing of a Gen-Z diarist,” and she describes her music as “modern jazz.” Her voice is in an uncategorizable dark alt, in which she sings melancholic jazz songs that combine classic and jazz music, accompanied by a hint of pop, which is music and lyrics choices that create an incomparable 'Laufey sound,' that breaks down genre barriers and is the essence of her talent. It all comes together to a swoony, romantic sound that also draws from midcentury musicals. She proves herself even more as a rising star with her second album, Bewitched, which won a Grammy in 2024 for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album, and according to Spotify streams, broke a record for the best debut jazz album in the history of the streaming platform. Within three years, Laufey has caught the attention of artists like Olivia Rodrigo, complementing her music, and Barbara Streisand, who invited Laufey for a duet on her album, The Secret Life, Partners, Volume II. This fall, she will begin her first arena tour, which will last two nights at Madison Square Garden.

A Matter of Time: An Orchestrated Chaos

On her new album A Matter of Time, published August 22, 2025, she partnered with producers Spencer Stewart and Aaron Dessner of The National, who has worked with Taylor Swift.

With this album, Laufey begins to cover new ground by addressing the ups and downs of love and friendship or reflecting on race, as in the song Snow White. The underlying tone of the album is most definitely more feminist than in the previous albums. In an Interview with Glamour, Laufey said she wished to portray “the various emotions that women go through in a day. It’s never one thing…how quickly you can go from rage to calm.” However, she also remains true to her songs about love. Still, in A Matter of Time, it is about “what I’ve learned about love…basically, the thesis of A Matter of Time is that you cannot hide a single flaw from yourself from the person that you fall in love with.”

The album’s opening track, Clockwork, tells the story of a date with a best friend, accompanied by a jazz guitar, before Laufey vastly overthinks every detail. With a “Ding Dong” in the background, the song is the start of Laufey’s time circle for the album, in which Clockwork works as the prelude for Lover Girl, the second track of the album. This track has been pre-released and functioned as the flagship of the album, because of which Laufey has called for ‘Lover Girl Summer’ – and the song proves why. It tells the story about having a crush on someone, gushing about the person, and being helpless about it. The lyric is light, romantic, and catchy, while also addressing her feminist perspective: "love-struck girl, I'd teased her though I’d never be her. Quite the job you’ve done on me, sir” – translating the light feeling of a crush into the 21st–century understanding of many women. Utterly present are woodwind instruments with classic jazz elements that are arranged in a rhythm that is classic pop – repetition of melody and chorus – creating a perfect earworm for Summer that also reflects the ‘Laufey Sound.’

The third track, Snow White, marks the first departure from the album's narrative cycle of a relationship, yet it remains one of the most essential songs. The songs address Laufey’s reflections on falling short of a fair-skinned beauty ideal, symbolized by Snow White, whom she thought resembled, but she was not as beautiful or as white. It is the first ballad of the album and has a simple yet compelling choice of instruments. In the first quarter of the song, Laufey is accompanied by a guitar. As the song reaches its climax, stringed bowed instruments come along and create a quiet and honest piece about the painful and universal experience of women being measured by unrealistic beauty standards, while also being a reflection on race. Snow White also deserves special recognition, as it explores the sadness and pain that come with being a modern woman, allowing this overwhelming feeling to be acknowledged.

This feeling of womanhood is also transmitted to Castle in Hollywood – a song about a friendship that ended and was her first true heartbreak. Instead of being bitter, she wishes her former best friend farewell and captures the feeling of a friend that breaks one's heart as much as romantic love can.

The last of the trio that reflects outside of romantic love is Carousel, which functions as a metaphor to express that her life has become a 'circus' that she cannot escape; instead, it can only go up and down, like sitting in a carousel that has now become her career.

Silver Lining takes us back to the romantic cycle of the album. The song evokes the feeling of a late-night date, creating a romantic yet nostalgic atmosphere that is reflected in the slowed-down and reduced musical accompaniment. With this track, the flirtations have ended, and she is willing for a relationship, to take the good things, the bad things, and the 'Silver Lining.' This song marks the transition from a harmless flirtation and crush to the decision to go all in, accepting a person with all their quirks without any compromises.

After her powerful decision to go all in with a new person, Laufey is taken back to her vulnerable side with Too Little, Too Late – a vulnerable piano ballad that expresses the feeling of sadness and rage about someone she was once romantically involved with and now calls her again. However, she can now finally let go. It is a powerful song about the ever-present question of 'what if,' but instead of fantasizing about this question, this song finds an end to all the romantic fantasies and pictures the freeing moment of letting go.

After expressing the feeling of moving on, the album offers a musical interlude, Cuckoo Ballet, that could be from a 1950s musical. The second part of the album introduces a more moody and dark expression, capturing its conflicting moods: swoony romance, sadness, longing, and rage.

However, Tough Luck and the following track, A Cautionary Tale, exist in a narrative duality. While the previous track has been full of self-empowerment, A Cautionary Tale allows for sadness about a bad relationship and the hurtful things that have been experienced. While it reflects on past mistakes, it serves as a reminder not to repeat them in the future. These two tracks express how Laufey created a coherent narrative in A Matter of Time while mastering the expression of a wide range of feelings.

This mastery is also continued with Mr. Electric, which tells the story of a boring date with an ego-driven man.

One of the most interesting songs from the musical side is for sure Clean Air, a ‘country-ish’ song she wished to create in the tradition of Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris, as she stated to The New York Times. On an album that combines classic, jazz, and pop country, it may seem like a stretch, and the song may not sound coherent with the rest of the album. However, through the choice of familiar instruments of Laufey that are just arranged like a country song, the heart of Laufey’s music is present and creates a wonderfully experimental song. It makes even more sense, given that in the second half of the album, Laufey’s lyrics and music become more experimental.

This becomes present in the grand finale of the album - the final track, Sabotage. A song about the feeling of being your own worst enemy, and that it is only a matter of time until someone will unravel her whole personality and discover the disaster that she is. This song is, in ways, the most intimate song of the album, as it lyrically reflects on one's flaws but plays out in one's head, expressed through soft music and is violently interrupted by pitched orchestra music throughout the song, eventually culminating into a one-minute-long chaotic orchestra arrangement, true to The Beatles song A Day in the Life. – encapsulating the mess in one's head and conflicting feelings. In the metaphor of Laufey’s clock cycle, we have arrived at midnight, where thoughts become uncontrollable.

With A Matter of Time, Laufey has created a carefully orchestrated album that embodies the chaos of womanhood and growing up, marked by loss, dreams, hopeful romances, and disappointments. Unlike her other albums, this one is not about a classic love story; instead, it explores womanhood and the conflicting, confusing feelings that come with it. While describing the album, it was a bold walk into anharmonic chaos. However, the complete opposite is true as the careful arrangement of the instruments and melodies has created a foundation for harmonizing this gush of emotions that is rare, raw, honest, and deeply felt.

With this album, Laufey has created her most interesting and diverse musical statement so far. It is a brave expression about emotions that can be felt all at once, and each holds a truth.  

 LISTEN TO LAUFEY'S NEW ALBUM HERE: