But when she started writing her own music, she realized she didn't fit neatly into either category. To some, she was the "savior of jazz," a title she gently pushes back against, noting that "90% of what I put on my albums is not jazz music". Instead, her work is a carefully crafted hybrid known as or jazz-pop . The Elements of the "Laufey Sound"
In songs like "Letter to My 13 Year Old Self," the orchestration is grand, yet the vocal delivery remains conversational and unpretentious. This juxtaposition—the grandeur of a string section against the intimacy of a whisper—is the core of her genre appeal. It democratizes jazz; it takes the music out of the smoky, inaccessible club and places it into the headphones of a lonely teenager. what type of genre is laufey
: She uses complex ii-V-I chord progressions and occasional scatting, but her songs lack the improvisation and blues-based culture found in traditional jazz clubs. Classical Precision But when she started writing her own music,
: She finds these labels "tiring" and prefers to describe her work as an exploration of mood and feeling . The Elements of the "Laufey Sound" In songs
So what genre is Laufey? The question ultimately reveals more about the asker than the artist. A jazz purist will call her a dilettante. A pop critic will call her an innovator. A streaming algorithm will call her “moody piano ballad.” Laufey herself seems content to let the question hover. In a 2023 NPR interview, she said: “I don’t really think about genre when I write. I think about a feeling I want to give someone—like they’re sitting in a dimly lit room with a glass of wine, thinking about someone they miss.”
The Daughter of Jazz and the Internet: Deconstructing the "Bridging" Genre of Laufey
