“It’s a matter of time until you find out who I truly am,” Laufey told NME about the journey her third album, ‘A Matter Of Time’, takes the listener on. Her 2022 debut ‘Everything I Know About Love’ and its 2023 Grammy-winning follow-up ‘Bewitched’ made the Icelandic-Chinese jazz–pop star a favourite among Gen-Z music fans, thanks to her knack for composing swoon-worthy orchestral songs to romanticise your life to. Now, she’s opening up more and beginning to dismantle the sparkling fairytale world she built on those records.
‘A Matter Of Time’ is just as gorgeous as its predecessors, but this time, there’s more darkness shadowing the gleam. Sometimes that manifests in Laufey’s vocals or lyrics – over the bossa nova swing (and Clairo backing vocals) of ‘Mr. Eclectic’, she elegantly eviscerates men trying to “woo and win” her. “You think you’re so interesting,” she sings with an audible eye roll and mocking smirk, putting pretentious posers who “think you’re so poetic / Quoting epics and ancient prose” firmly in their place.
At others, imperfection shines through in the music itself. That’s most evident on closing track ‘Sabotage’, which sets an ominous tone from its opening bars. Flurries of discordant strings puncture the song intermittently throughout before it all erupts into frenzied layers of dissonance. It’s jarring – especially coming at the end of an album full of beautiful sounds – but gloriously so, reflecting the fantasy falling to pieces around the singer.
And as Laufey promised NME, ‘A Matter Of Time’ also gives more insight into the artist than before. Here, we learn about her insecurities and that she’s not immune to the shallow expectations society places on women (“The people want beauty, skinny always wins / And I don’t have enough of it,” she sighs on ‘Snow White’).
She shares her homesickness for Iceland on the haunting ‘Forget-Me-Not’, which features the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and her first lyrics written in Icelandic. She reveals how she takes on the personality of whoever she’s dating as she attempts to break through habit on ‘A Cautionary Tale’. ‘Silver Lining’, a smoky lounge song made for dingy jazz bars, puts her in a coquettish mood.
“My life is a circus / Hold on for all I bring with me,” Laufey warns on the pretty waltz of ‘Carousel’. ‘Bewitched’’s global breakthrough may have brought more chaos to her door, but here, she juggles it beautifully, letting us peek behind the curtain while maintaining her poise throughout. For better or worse, that circus won’t end with ‘A Matter Of Time’ – an album that should only accelerate Laufey’s already-dizzying trajectory.
