Concert review: Magnetic presence of rising jazz-pop star Laufey

Laufey – Bewitched: The Goddess Tour (Asia & Australia)

Singapore Expo Hall 7
Sept 4

Long gone are the days when Laufey, whose music is a deft meld of jazz, pop and classical, was a cult act.

In the past year, the half-Chinese, half-Icelandic singer has seen a meteoric rise in global popularity, and has almost single-handedly made genres from the 1940s and 1950s cool again among young adults and teenagers.

Playing to an audience of 7,000 – who were overwhelmingly Gen Z, with a sprinkling of Gen Alphas – all tickets to the show were sold out within minutes after they went on sale in May.

The 25-year-old multi-instrumentalist, whose name is pronounced “lay-vay”, seemed genuinely stunned that the crowd was much bigger than the audience at her gig here a little over a year ago at Pasir Panjang Power Station.

Here are three takeaways from her latest show.

1. She sounds better live than on record

It would have been ideal to hear her music in a venue designed for optimum acoustics – the Esplanade Concert Hall or Theatre, for example.

Singapore Expo Hall 7 is decent, but during the hushed moments, you could hear noise bleeding in from the outside, which was a distraction.

Still, the singer managed to turn the 90-minute show in the cavernous venue into what felt like an intimate performance, charming her way into the hearts of the fans with her magnetic presence.

There was a lot of heart in the banter between songs, when she regaled the audience with the stories behind her music, mostly centred on her experiences as a young adult navigating romance in the 2020s.

She prefaced the encore, Letter To My 13 Year Old Self, with a feel-good story about chasing her dreams, despite growing up feeling like a “nerd” who always felt out of place.

“I grew up always feeling really like I didn’t belong, you know?” she quipped. “I grew up in Iceland, and I’m half-Chinese, so I didn’t look like everyone else.”

Her alto voice was velvety smooth, and she nimbly switched among a Steinway grand piano, acoustic and electric guitars, and cello. Backed by a four-piece band and a string quartet, she also brought on twin sister Junia to play violins on bossa nova tune From The Start.

2. Her fans understood the assignment

“You’re so beautiful and so cute, and you all sing really well too,” she praised the crowd, many of whom wore classy dresses and had ribbons and bows in their hair, a staple look at Laufey shows worldwide. Some young men even wore suits.

Popular tracks such as Dreamer from Bewitched (2023), the album that won Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album at the 2024 Grammys, elicited screams that could rival any K-pop show.

But there was also hushed reverence during quieter songs such as Second Best.

Tracks like Valentine and Falling Behind, both from her 2022 debut album Everything I Know About Love, sparked massive singalongs that almost drowned out her voice.

3. Her music is not all light and airy

Most of her repertoire harks back to a time before rock ’n’ roll became a driving force in popular music, designed to be sung by female characters in old black-and-white Hollywood films.

But her set list did include contemporary touches. Heartbreak song Lovesick, and its thumping drums, crosses over into pop-rock territory.

And while many of her tunes are laced with humour – Bored is an amusing takedown of men who talk only about themselves – she is capable of taking on darker tones in her music too.

The melancholic and cinematic Goddess, for example, with its post-rock undertones, is a raw rumination on a former lover who desired only Laufey the pop star, and not the regular human underneath all the glamour.