Lay-vay, loi-vay. Whichever pronunciation you choose, please don’t forget it the next time you introduce Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir. Garnering a whopping total of 12.3 million and counting monthly listeners on Spotify, she has created quite a stir in the modern jazz scene following a video essay from her fellow colleague who had also studied at Berklee’s College of Music, Adam Neely, clarifying Laufey’s compositions and renditions of jazz standards as not entirely “jazz”, but jazz-inspired pop music. 

Regardless of how resemblant her works are to that of each genre’s founding figures and contemporaries, what matters truly for hopeless romantics, including myself, is her indefatigable efforts to bridge concepts of romance, jazz, and a love for jazz, especially in an age where teenagers are becoming more disconnected from a type of music often appealing to golden-agers. In these upcoming “brrr”-months, let us have our numbed ears melt to her warm, tender vibrato and incomparable timbre at an opportune time, along with my introduction to the up-and-coming artist’s repertoire.

After hearing a snippet of her song “Falling Behind” on TikTok months ago, I knew then and there that I had fallen in love with her adroit songwriting from the start. Though the song focuses on Laufey’s touching observation of everyone and everything around her having a significant counterpart while her having none at all, I never knew that there could be a song shorter than 3 minutes capable of aptly describing my life at KAIST. 

“Everybody’s falling in love and I’m falling behind.”

Her velvety voice singing those melancholic phrases as the syncopated bongo-like beats run in the song’s background carefully teases and reflects the trivial affairs I experience every day: my performance compared to my peers, my best efforts to be one of the first ones in line during peak hours in the student cafeteria, and my battles against constant deadlines. For those unfamiliar with the genre, “Falling Behind” may come off as elevator music at best. But, for those beginning to realize their ability to infatuate or purely smitten with someone, this melody might just reenact the elevator scene in 500 Days of Summer where Zooey Deschanel casually remarks to Joseph Gordon-Levitt—“I love the Smiths.”
Laufey’s poignant storytelling does not end with merely one song. If you are in a lingering, helpless state between limerence and moving on, “Promise” is the perfect nostalgic track to listen to as you plod your feet through autumn’s fallen leaves. 

“I made a promise to distance myself.”

Reminiscing the countless methods I sought to distract myself from the person I liked, despite eventually ending up daydreaming about our what-ifs, I explored the “more than friends” phase that had portrayed itself as a “realistic” option. I was worried these nonreciprocal delusions would complicate things given my confession; thus, I have decided to bottle my feelings and play pretend while isolating myself from them further as the day turns into weeks. 

“So I broke my promise, I called you last night.”

Like vices, my intentional suppressions had backfired, relapsed if you will; the most I could recall was a random drunk profession of my fondness in the dead of night. Albeit feeling embarrassed about what happened the night before, I woke up relieved with a heart missing a massive stone where it had been placed, all thanks to her cathartic single. Heavily influenced by swing and the blues, Laufey’s “Promise” expresses her strivings to find a compromise with the individual she holds dear in her heart through the pronounced use of snare drum brushes, a melodic combination of the piano and violin, and simple yet evocative lyrics. 

It would be hasty to assume that all Laufey writes about are shared qualities of our vicarious experiences around affection and nothing more. “Above the Chinese Restaurant” narrates a couple’s lamentation on living atop a small apartment where they would enjoy eating dumplings and loving the Chinatown view at night. “Questions for the Universe” demonstrates the fascination for curiosity and dilemmas the natural phenomenon happening around her. Backed by the dreamy voices of the choir remnant of the fifties and sixties music, “Dreamer” revolves around freeing oneself from love’s embrace and emphasizing self-care. At the young age of 24, the Icelandic-Chinese singer-songwriter’s precise portrayal of love’s manifestations in different mediums captivates younger audiences without the intervention of idealistic, fetishized ideas of love commonly marketed in soap operas. In essence, her pieces about adoration and the like are as both genuine and surreal as you can get as Walt Whitman’s poetry to transcendentalism. Along the lines of what Laufey sings in “I Wish You Love”, I part our ways with: “But most of all, when snowflakes fall, I wish you love.”