Laufey has all the time felt “undefined.” Whether or not it was her distinctive, fashionable jazz sound or her id as a Chinese language Icelandic artist, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter and producer tells POPSUGAR she “all the time felt like an anomaly and a little bit of an outsider in my communities.”
“Being a bit completely different turned my established order.”
The artist, who lately took residence her first Grammy for finest conventional pop vocal album, has taken the music world — and TikTok — by storm. Since going viral on the platform in early 2022, she’s launched two albums, the second of which earned her the accolade. “Being a bit completely different turned my established order. I took my expertise of being undefined into the music trade,” she says.
Laufey’s background rising up with Chinese language and Icelandic mother and father in Iceland and later residing in the US was pivotal to constructing her sound and, ultimately, her profession in music. “I had such a mixture of experiences studying music,” she says. Her first foray into music was linked to her Chinese language tradition — via her mom, a world-class violinist, and her maternal grandfather, who taught the instrument.
Laufey took piano classes at Beijing’s prestigious Central Conservatory of Music, and she carried out as a solo cellist for the Iceland Symphony Orchestra at 15. When she began attending Berklee Faculty of Music in Boston, she discovered jazz and pop for the primary time. “All of these experiences allowed me to develop up listening to the completely different sounds of every of my cultures and taught me concerning the issues that bind completely different musical disciplines collectively and what units them aside,” she explains. Her mix of jazz, classical, and pop is so distinctive that there is usually debate over defining her precise style of music.
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Along with influencing her music, her school expertise allowed her to embrace extra of her Asian heritage, which she says she wasn’t uncovered to rising up in Iceland. “Dwelling in the US has given me publicity to larger Asian communities that I did not essentially have rising up in Iceland, the place my mom and a couple of of her mates had been the extent of my Asian neighborhood,” she says. “Outdoors of the music trade, I have been in a position to embrace my id as an Asian and be extra happy with that facet of me.” In flip, that shift has given her the chance to “join on a deeper stage” together with her followers of Asian descent.
And now, as a younger girl in the music trade, Laufey is obsessed with opening up alternatives for different girls artists, notably these of shade. She will rely the variety of girls producers she’s labored with on one hand. By means of Bose’s Flip the Dial initiative, which goals to shut the gender hole in music manufacturing, the musician collaborated with Eunike Tanzil, a rising producer and composer, to create a music from scratch in simply three hours. “Eunike has such a phenomenal method of approaching a easy melody, which is what drew me to her in the start,” Laufey says. “It is an honor to create music with different Asian girls in the trade. Collectively, we carry to our music a kind of sincerity that’s distinctive to our backgrounds.”
As she continues to climb the charts, Laufey understands her undefined style and id symbolize what mainstream music and media have been lacking. For Laufey, her latest Grammy win was “for many who could not determine who they needed to be.”
As she places it: “It was a stamp of approval proving that you do not have to comply with a sure path in order to succeed in music.”