Laufey Wants to Show the World Her ‘Hidden Demons’ on New Album A Matter of Time

Laufey understands that superstardom is the simple act of walking a very thin line between manifestation and delusion, a tight-rope the 26-year-old vocalist has no problem balancing.

“Recently, a girl who goes to my old high school found my yearbook," Laufey tells Teen Vogue ahead of Gold House's 4th Annual Gold Gala. “One of the questions [in it] was, ‘What are the things you see yourself doing in 10 years?’ This was when I graduated from 10th grade. I said, ‘Move to the United States, win a Grammy, and get signed to a record label.”

Laufey's musical reach has grown significantly over the last few years, and even more since her first-ever Grammy win and her sold-out headlining tour (110 shows!) in 2024 for her sophomore album Bewitched. Yet the fame has arrived at such a quick pace that it's easy to forget this young woman with the cool, kind demeanor — reminiscent of a main character who would let the new girl at school sit with her at lunch — is the same one dominating those sold out arenas.

That aura, she tells me, is a result of her decision to never lose sight of the girl she once was as she continues to grow into who she is. With so many milestones already accomplished, it's no wonder Laufey says her next album, A Matter of Time, set to release on August 22nd, will feel like another “turning point” in her career.

“This is the first album I'm going into [with the] understanding that I am allowed to take up this amount of space,” she says. “I think with the last two albums, I was just making music. I was still making the music I love, but I was also hoping and praying that people would listen. The last album blew up in a way that I never thought my music would. So I definitely had to expand my vision a little bit.”

The genre-blending singer says “there's more instrumentation” on her third studio album, calling it “louder” and “bigger.” “I'm playing arenas now and I need to fill into that space, and I'm playing for an audience that is so passionate and sings along to every single word,” says Laufey. "This is the most confident album I've made, and it's definitely the most ambitious, but it's the most me I've ever been.”

Below, Teen Vogue caught up with Laufey to talk about her journey of self-discovery through music, adapting to life in Los Angeles from Iceland, and what fans can expect from her forthcoming album.

Laufey: My mom's a violinist, and my grandparents were both classical musicians as well. I grew up in a very musical, very classical household. I started playing piano and cello at a very young age, and spent my whole life practicing scales and working towards being in a conservatory.

But then I also really loved singing, and my dad loved playing jazz at home. I always had a very low voice, and I think got into jazz music through that. I could hear similarities between classical music and how it developed into jazz, and I loved musicals as well.

As a kid, I loved Golden Age films [like] The Sound of Music, The Wizard of Oz, and An American in Paris. Those were my favorite movies. So, between those three sounds, [classical, jazz, and show tunes], I became the musician that I am today. The first time I sang in public, I sang “Singing in the Rain.”

I was a classical musician and a jazz singer, but I loved pop music. I’ve loved Taylor Swift since I was very young — Rihanna, Miley Cyrus. I always had this dream of making music that brought all these different parts of myself together. I went to college in the States and moved from Iceland, [and that's when] I think I finally had that nest to develop it.

I started posting videos of myself singing jazz standards and little snippets of songs I'd written on TikTok and Instagram and began growing the following. I think that's why I'm so connected with my audience, because I feel like we started together.

L: Oh my God, not at all! I feel like I've always been taught to be very humble and have, not low expectations, but a sort of protective mechanism where I didn't dare to dream too big because I didn't want to be disappointed with myself. But also, I'd never seen an artist [like] me succeed in the way that I have now.

I hadn't seen anyone Asian in the pop world, and I hadn't seen somebody combining jazz or classical music like these kinds of older mediums and sounds into something that was ultimately a very modern project and a modern girl. It was hard for me to envision that it was possible. I think it's human nature to see something and strive towards it, right?

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a teacher. That was my dream. That was because when I was 5, I was so in awe of my school teacher, and my mom's a violin teacher, so I was in awe of her, too. We take what's near to us and we strive towards it. If we have an astronaut costume at home, you want to be an astronaut. I'd never seen this costume of a singer like me, and so it was really hard to strive towards it.

L: It's super weird, because I don't feel very different. The way I perceive the world, down to the way I dress, is very much the same as [it was] even 10 years ago. My body's the same, but then I do these things and go on red carpets and play on stages that my idols have been on and it's very insane. It's hard sometimes because I never want to think of myself as anything other than myself, but sometimes you need to artificially inflate your confidence to be able to get through a red carpet without crying at the end of it.

L: I'm wearing these clothes that I never thought I'd get to wear, and trying on sample sizes and being in photoshoots. I love it all so much, like adult dress-up, but it's also so disorienting to all of a sudden see yourself as that type of a person.

Not a day has passed where I don't think about how I can stay me. I place such an emphasis on staying the same person. I think I've surrounded myself with really good people and made sure [of that], but I always joke with my artist friends, it's like, “Is [today] going to be God complex or crippling self-doubt?”

You need to genuinely have both… you need that God complex. That's how men get ahead. You need the God complex to manifest and be confident. But then the crippling self-doubt always comes in, but all artists have crippling doubts. That's how you create art. Every single day, you're walking this line, like, “What's it going to be?”

L: Literally! You have those days you wake up with a little bit of a God complex; they wake up like that every day. So, you better find it within you.

L: Playing at the Hollywood Bowl was kind of one of those moments, for sure… the history of it, being in my new town. The way it's set up, it's on a mountain. There was a moment during my song “Valentine” where the fans had done this project [and] made thousands of little heart cutouts, and they wrote on the cards to put it over [their] phone flashlights. The whole Bowl was lit up with hearts.

I was just like, “Oh my God, what?” I was, first of all, overwhelmed by how the community had gathered together to do that and do that for me. I was not a popular kid growing up. Seeing that was very validating for the child within me. Especially knowing it's a community of people who also maybe weren't the most popular is so beautiful, too. There were so many people. It was wild, but it was so filled with kindness, and it looked so beautiful. I was like, “Oh my God, this looks like a movie.”

L: Oh my God, so scary. I feel like it was really tough. I love it because obviously there's so much musical history and there were so many artists and people that had these big dreams, and being among them is really, really cool. I love it and have fully settled in there. But it is entirely a bubble that you step in and out of.

And in contrast to Iceland, it is so different. It's literally landing on a different planet. I still struggle with the transitions of leaving and going back into LA every time, because it's such a big step. There are many beautiful things about LA for me. I felt for the first time that I wasn't being necessarily distinguished by where I was from or what my ethnicity was. In Iceland, I was always the Asian girl or the twin… I was always being pegged by my background. La is the first place where I've never been pegged by my background.

When you take that away, you get to be pegged by your interests, who you are to your core. That's such a beautiful thing. Being seen by people who've had similar experiences as you, [who have] similar cultural backgrounds, literally eating the same foods growing up, or have an aunt who has the same traits — that makes you feel seen. I think it's important to experience being with people who are very much like you, [and] I think it's also really important to experience being the odd one out. I think all artists are created for being the odd one out, so I am thankful for that experience.

L: I had a really close friend when I first moved there, and then we kind of were no longer as good friends. Nothing awful, but you grow in and out of people as you grow up and you have friend breakups as much as you have boyfriend breakups. And I think those sometimes touch you in an even crazier way, which, honestly, I have a song about it on the album, but I feel like all my girlfriends have gone through a more painful friend breakup than they've gone through a relationship breakup.

But it was definitely tough because I was going in and out a lot, still. I was only in LA for chunks of time because I was touring a lot. It definitely took a while to find myself. I think it was also hard to find friends who were very real and not just talking about [their] careers the whole time. I've also kind of [experienced] that with New York: I would have full conversations and hangouts with people where we talked essentially about our jobs the whole time.

L: Or how do you feel? What are you going through right now? Or what's your favorite movie? It definitely took me a long time to trust people because my trust was breached a little bit. I feel like I really have my community now, actually, for the first time.

L: I wanted to write a song that was angry. I went through this experience with a guy that was so mean, almost to the point where I couldn't believe it, and I wanted to throw it all into a song. Everything in it's true. I didn't have to make anything up. This one, honestly, I was like, “This is a song that writes itself.”

I've shown the world a very prim, buttoned-up side of myself. Not because I am buttoned-up — I don't really know how I've come off like that — but I'm not at all that perfect A-type person in the corner. I'm actually very B-type. I run late. I'm an absolute potty mouth. I'm not as buttoned-up as people think. I wanted to show these kinds of hidden demons within myself on this album, and specifically in this song, I wanted to show anger. I wanted to show that side of me.

L: Oh my God, I'm a very public late bloomer. Most of the world is. I just transcribe my life, and up until very recently, my life was all these extremely fuzzy, unanswerable questions about love. I just wrote them into my songs. I felt like a lot of my friends around me were experiencing the same things. That's why I write music the way I do. I just had all these questions for the universe and had to get them out there, and it was my way of getting towards the answer.

L: I think there’s definitely a bit of anger within me, a little bit of female rage.

L: Exactly! Every single person, [but] especially women. A woman [has] such an insane range of emotions within her. We all, for different reasons, serve a different emotion outside every single day. Some women come off super calm and quiet, other women come off super angry — and they're probably just standing on their business and the world has painted them as terrible women. We all have that range of emotion within us. So that's what I hope that people see within me, that range of emotions.