With deep, diving vocals that recall jazz icons of yesteryear, the 23-year-old from Iceland is now more popular than Björk and Sigur Rós. She speaks with Ellie Muir about learning to love her distinct voice, her pivot to Christmas music – and her chance encounter with Hollywood star Bill Murray.
![[Laufey won Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album at the Grammys for her second record ‘Bewitched’]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/12/19/15/GettyImages-1986146798.jpg)
Words of affirmation are important when you’re a teenage girl – so when Bill Murray told Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir, the Grammy-winning jazz artist known as Laufey, that she was a “powerful woman” at 17, she took it to heart. “I remember also being confused,” she recalls today, now 25. “I hadn’t put out any music then; I was just a nerdy little classical cello student.” Still, Murray turned out to be right.
![[‘I never felt pretty or light or young. I always felt very foreign, different, and heavy,’ says Laufey]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/12/19/15/newFile-7.jpg)
Only four years later, the Icelandic-Chinese singer went viral on TikTok with her Forties-inspired classic jazz croons, which introduced Generation Z to the famously stuffy genre. The following year, she released her sparkling debut album Everything I Know About Love. By 2023, Jónsdóttir had beaten Björk and Sigur Rós as the most streamed artist from Iceland, and this year won the Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album at the Grammys for her second record Bewitched – and all without the backing of a major label.
Laufey songs are comforting yet mischievous, indebted to her background in classical music, with deep vocals that dive effortlessly into those roaring low registers of female jazz icons before her. “I would sing in public, and everyone would be like, ‘She’s got the voice of a divorced woman in the body of a 13-year-old girl,’” Jónsdóttir says. “I never felt pretty or light or young. I always felt very foreign, different, and heavy. I felt like I was a circus freak. It’s so loaded for a young girl to hear.”.
