Laufey has at all times felt “undefined.” Whether or not it was once her distinctive, trendy jazz sound or her identification as a Chinese language Icelandic artist, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter and manufacturer tells POPSUGAR she “at all times felt like an anomaly and slightly of an intruder in my communities.”
“Being slightly other turned into my establishment.”
The artist, who not too long ago took house her first Grammy for easiest conventional pop vocal album, has taken the track global — and TikTok — by means of hurricane. Since going viral at the platform in early 2022, she’s launched two albums, the second one of which earned her the accolade. “Being slightly other turned into my establishment. I took my enjoy of being undefined into the track trade,” she says.
Laufey’s background rising up with Chinese language and Icelandic folks in Iceland and later dwelling in the USA was once pivotal to construction her sound and, sooner or later, her profession in track. “I had this sort of mixture of reports finding out track,” she says. Her first foray into track was once hooked up to her Chinese language tradition — via her mom, a world-class violinist, and her maternal grandfather, who taught the software.
Laufey took piano classes at Beijing’s prestigious Central Conservatory, then performed in orchestra and chamber track whilst attending highschool in Iceland. When she began attending Berklee School of Tune in Boston, she discovered jazz and dad for the primary time. “All of the ones reports allowed me to develop up listening to the other sounds of each and every of my cultures and taught me concerning the issues that bind other musical disciplines in combination and what units them aside,” she explains. Her mix of jazz, classical, and dad is so distinctive that there is continuously debate over defining her actual style of track.
Along with influencing her track, her school enjoy allowed her to embody extra of her Asian heritage, which she says she wasn’t uncovered to rising up in Iceland. “Residing in the USA has given me publicity to greater Asian communities that I did not essentially have rising up in Iceland, the place my mom and a couple of of her buddies had been the level of my Asian group,” she says. “Out of doors of the track trade, I have been ready to embody my identification as an Asian and be extra pleased with that facet of me.” In flip, that shift has given her the chance to “attach on a deeper stage” together with her fanatics of Asian descent.
And now, as a tender lady within the track trade, Laufey is hooked in to opening up alternatives for different ladies artists, specifically the ones of colour. She will be able to depend the choice of ladies manufacturers she’s labored with on one hand. Via Bose’s Flip the Dial initiative, which objectives to near the gender hole in track manufacturing, the musician collaborated with Eunike Tanzil, a emerging manufacturer and composer, to create a track from scratch in simply 3 hours. “Eunike has this sort of stunning approach of drawing near a easy melody, which is what drew me to her at first,” Laufey says. “It is an honor to create track with different Asian ladies within the trade. In combination, we deliver to our track one of those sincerity this is distinctive to our backgrounds.”
As she continues to climb the charts, Laufey understands her “undefined” style and identification constitute what mainstream track and media were lacking. For Laufey, her contemporary Grammy win was once “for many who could not work out who they sought after to be.”
As she places it: “It was once a stamp of approval proving that you just would not have to practice a definite trail so as to achieve track.”