Laufey at the Paramount

Reflections from her April 9 2024 show

Laufey, a 24-year-old singer-songwriter from Iceland, played to a crowd of nearly 3,000 at the Paramount in Seattle. It was one of many stops on her sold-out North American tour. 

Laufey is trained in classical piano and cello, and grew up playing in orchestras. Her main musical influences are jazz legends from more than 50 years ago. In these ways, Laufey is an unlikely star for today. And in other ways, she’s exactly the star of the moment – she’s a regular presence on TikTok, where she’s amassed 4.4 million followers. Her lyrics cover heartbreak, rejection and relationships that barely were. 

At the Paramount, her fans were lined up for blocks waiting to get in. Many of them wore lacy, flow-y dresses and ribbons — attached to their clothes, knotted around their necks, tied in their hair — emulating Laufey’s signature style. Her fans seem to be pretty young, judging by the crowd in Seattle and by the fact that she has more followers on Tiktok and than on Instagram (which is for the olds). There was enthusiastic screaming throughout the show, and a lot of it. It was no “Swift Quake,” but it was definitely a scene. 

Laufey’s voice is deep, rich and incredibly soulful. She has incredible vocal control, sprinkling touches of breathiness, crackliness and vibrato into her expansive tone in perfect measure. She very rarely belts: something rather uncommon for a modern pop-stars. 

But while her voice sounds like she could be from another era, her lyrics are pretty firmly in this decade. She introduced one of her songs by recounting about a “situationship” she found herself in. A lyric from her song From the Start – ”oh the burning pain, listening to you harp on ‘bout some new soulmate/she’s so perfect, blah blah blah” – sounds like it could’ve been written by Olivia Rodrigo or another of her pop contemporaries. (In live shows, her fans sing along when she says “blah blah blah”). 

Laufey is a multi-instrumentalist, and throughout her show switched between guitar, cello and piano. She is backed by a full band and a string quartet, which accompanies her on her songs that are arranged for orchestra. One of my personal favorites was Falling Behind, off her 2022 album, “Everything I Know about Love.” Set to a deceptively peppy bossa nova beat, the lyrics explore how it feels when all of your friends find romantic partners and you’re single (“I’ve never had a shoulder to cry on/someone to call mine/ Everybody’s falling in love/ and I’m falling behind”). 

Something particularly special about Laufey is she’s an artist you can comfortably recommend to just about everyone. Your parents, your friends’ parents, your millennial co-worker, your cool Gen-Z cousin: everyone can find something to love about Laufey. 

Laufey has said in interviews that she hopes to do for jazz and classical music what Taylor Swift has done for country. It seems very possible that in another decade, she’ll have done just that — and will be playing sold-out stadiums and registering on the local seismometer.