Why Laufey Calls New Album ‘A Matter of Time’ Her “Most Daring Project”

“The world has come to know me as this fairly soft-spoken, buttoned-up girl that dances down the street with ribbons in her hair, and I totally am that, but I also can be angry and anxious as well,” Icelandic-Chinese jazz-pop singer Laufey tells The Hollywood Reporter.

With the release of her third studio album, A Matter of Time, on Aug. 22, the 26-year-old Grammy winner is leaning into that darker side. The new 14-track collection ballasts her familiar dreamy, coquettish sound with vulnerability and anguish. She calls it her “most daring project” yet.

“I have so many complex emotions within me. I’m just really good at hiding them,” she says. “I think with this album, I just want to let them out a little bit. I wanted to show the world the rest of me.”

A Matter of Time is about the self-discovery that comes with falling in love, says the musician, whose birth name is Laufey (pronounced “LAY-vay”) Lín Bing Jónsdóttir. She describes it as the “the overthinker’s guide to love,” noting she didn’t even recognize herself at times throughout the process. “I never thought that it would bring out this much emotion in me,” she adds. “Even when it’s a love song, it’s like, ‘Who am I?’ “

The song from the new album that perhaps best answers that question is “Sabotage,” which she describes as the meeting of the chaotic and ethereal.

“The very beautiful melodic piano piece, part of ‘Sabotage’ — that’s how I appear on the outside. I’m always dressed up. I’m always wearing some fucking little dress and ballet flats,” she continues. “But on the inside, there might be an absolute mess. That noise in ‘Sabotage,’ those disturbances, that was my musical way of displaying anxiety.”

The singer hovers in a genre limbo. She was a classical cello prodigy and studied jazz at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music but considers herself a pop musician and songwriter. She explains that she tries not to internalize the labels others put on her.

“The most dangerous thing that I could do as a musician now, especially knowing that I’m a people pleaser, is to internalize too much of what other people say and read too much of other people’s analysis,” she says.

“I’ve never been able to be put into a box my whole life. I’m not fully Icelandic, I’m not fully Chinese, I’m not American, I’m not even an individual. I’m an identical twin.” Her twin sister, Junia Lin, directed the music video for her song “Snow White,” which was released in August.

The singer refuses to be pegged as one thing — she’s a jazz singer, she’s a pop star, she’s a singer-songwriter — as opposed to the reality that she’s a mix of all of these identities at once. “Nobody really knows who I am fully except for myself,” she says.

Her rise can be traced to her early presence on TikTok, where she began posting videos of herself performing jazz standards. She now boasts 8.7 million followers on that platform alone. Her massive social media presence helped propel her already rising recording artist career, resulting in her first Grammy, for best traditional pop album, Bewitched, at the 2024 ceremony.

While Laufey owes her fame in part to TikTok, she says she struggles with the pressures of social media. “It’s a funny balance because I want to be aware of what’s happening, and I need to be aware of what’s happening. I find out so much through social media, and I want to know what my fans are interested in,” Laufey says.

But TikTok has been a double-edged sword, says the singer, who admits she’s been weirded out by “full comments sections” in which people dissect nearly every part of her, both physically and musically. “I just try my best to ignore it.”

Even teasing new music has become a bit of a balancing act. The singer notes how, these days, a 10-second clip of a song can be fully dissected and judged before the whole piece is even released. “When I think about my favorite artists, whether they were visual artists or composers or singers from the past, they weren’t getting a full review of their music or their album based off of a teaser,” she continues. “I often think about that and how it affects my journey and how it’s actually quite important for me to tune out the noise to be able to reach my full artistic ability.”

This story appeared in the Aug. 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.