Words of affirmation are important when you’re a teenage girl – so when Bill Murray told Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir, the Grammy-winning jazz artist known as Laufey, that she was a “powerful woman” at 17, she took it to heart. “I remember also being confused,” she recalls today, now 25. “I hadn’t put out any music then; I was just a nerdy little classical cello student.” Still, Murray turned out to be right.
Only four years later, the Icelandic-Chinese singer went viral on TikTok with her Forties-inspired classic jazz croons, which introduced Generation Z to the famously stuffy genre. The following year, she released her sparkling debut album Everything I Know About Love. By 2023, Jónsdóttir had beaten Björk and Sigur Rós as the most streamed artist from Iceland, and this year won the Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album at the Grammys for her second record Bewitched – and all without the backing of a major label.
