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48 Hours with Iceland’s Biggest Star

48 Hours with Iceland’s Biggest Star

Public Opinion
April 03, 2024

A Note from Jack

We first met Laufey in early December. She was in town to perform her Christmas song on Good Morning America. Afterwards she stopped by to play Track Star. She crushed it, but more importantly we had a great time hanging with her and her dad who was visiting from Iceland. A couple months later I got a call from Laufey’s manager saying that the Iceland tourism board was offering to fly us to Iceland to shoot something around a series of three homecoming shows she was playing at the Reykjavik Concert Hall.

The dream at Public Opinion is to tell really interesting and dynamic stories and this project was an incredible opportunity to do just that. We’re never going to stop making the Track Star game show but the plan is to leverage that show into bigger stories that go a little deeper like 48 Hours and Presents. Thanks for watching and for supporting the dream.

Read up on Laufey in Quinn’s amazing piece down below.

– Jack

48 Hours in Iceland with Laufey

Laufey’s Homegrown Success

By Quinn Moreland

Track Star’s latest video follows the Icelandic singer Laufey as she returns to her hometown of Reykjavík for a series of sold-out shows at the Harpa concert hall. That this was the 24-year-old’s second time performing at the renowned venue is testament to her wild popularity. Laufey played the space back in 2022 alongside the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, an achievement that was later released as her 2023 live album A Night At the Symphony. With an expanded edition of Laufey’s 2023 sophomore album Bewitched fast approaching on April 26, it’s not a bad time to reintroduce Laufey.

Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir’s musical roots run deep. Her grandparents were professors of music in China, and her mother is a classical violinist. Laufey and her twin sister, Júnía Lín Jónsdóttir, both picked up instruments as youngsters, with Laufey learning piano and later cello. (In addition to being her sister’s creative director, Júnía is a violist and joins her sister onstage.)

Laufey began developing her songwriting voice while studying at Berklee College of Music in Boston. She began formulating her own blend of classical, jazz, and pop while writing lyrics that captured the highs and lows of 21st century young adulthood. After self-releasing her debut single, 2020’s “Street by Street,” Laufey spent lockdown posting videos of herself singing standards by Ella Fitzgerald and Chet Baker in addition to her own original songs. TikTok quickly went wild for her torch songs and Gen Z swooned over her 2022 debut, Everything I Know About Love, which combined old-school nostalgia with modern, Swiftian storytelling.

Her second album, 2023’s Bewitched, continued Laufey’s ascent, reaching no. 1 on Billboard’s Jazz Albums and Traditional Jazz Albums charts. That same year, she beat out Björk and Sigur Rós to become the most streamed Icelandic artist. She also landed her first Grammy nomination and win for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album.

Laufey’s whirlwind success comes at a moment where the confines of jazz are being stretched, with artists like André 3000, Kassa Overall, and Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah proving that the genre’s DNA is readily mutatable to reflect the times. Mainstream institutions are taking note—the fusionist duo Domi and JD Beck were nominated for Best New Artist at the 2023 Grammys, ultimately losing to Samara Joy, a social media savvy jazz vocalist. Laufey is more than ready to rise to the occasion—as she jokes in the Track Star video, she’s put a lot of work into the underwater portion of her musical iceberg.