Laufey on making jazz cool again (and the fish that brought out her inner rage)

For decades, “jazz” carried a museum smell in pop culture—respected, taught in conservatories, but rarely the sound teenagers queued online to hear first. Laufey’s rise belongs to a wider loosening of that frame: chord changes and standards reintroduced through streaming playlists, intimate vocal takes, and aesthetics borrowed from bedroom pop and film scores.

In interviews, she has described the past year as a blur of stages, jet lag, and gratitude—the kind of acceleration that can flatten an artist into a brand unless they carve space for play. One outlet, she told the BBC, was a music video that leaned deliberately absurd: fish, chaos, and permission to look unpolished on camera.

That “primal” turn matters because her public image often skews polished—crisp tailoring, warm humor, the cello as both instrument and visual anchor. Letting rage and silliness coexist widens the emotional palette fans recognise from her ballads, where restraint is already doing heavy narrative work.

Behind the scenes, the story is also industrial. Streaming rewards constant content; labels watch monthly listeners; TikTok clips can resurrect a B-side. Artists who work in jazz-adjacent lanes must negotiate authenticity talk—who is allowed to borrow from whom—while still competing on the same dashboards as pure pop acts.

Her Icelandic roots surface in subtle ways: small-country fluency in multilingual audiences, a comfort with long winters and indoor creativity, and a lineage of musicians who treat genre as suggestion rather than law. None of that erases the American songbook tradition she draws on; it complicates it productively.

Critics will keep arguing whether the music is “really” jazz. The more interesting question is whether new listeners stay long enough to discover Ellington and Monk because Laufey opened the door—a conversion story the industry quietly craves.

BBC News published the full interview, including her reflections on the video shoot and the year’s pace. Read quotes and context in the original piece: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c99lvggdy4jo?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss

Newsorga condenses themes for readers scanning many stories; defer to the BBC for exact phrasing and any later corrections.