I was today days old when I learned there's a 26-year-old singer-songwriter — classically trained cellist, Berklee graduate, daughter of an Icelandic father and a Chinese concert violinist — who has quietly won Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album at the Grammys twice in a row and is single-handedly pulling Gen Z into jazz, bossa nova, and old-school standards.
Her name is Laufey (say it "LAY-vay" — it's Icelandic for a tree in Norse mythology). Her full name is Laufey Lín Bing Jónsdóttir. She was born April 23, 1999 in Reykjavík. Her dad is Icelandic. Her mom is a classical violinist from Guangzhou, China. She has an identical twin sister, Júnía, who serves as her creative director. If that sounds like the opening of a novel, yes.
Here's her most popular song — "Lover Girl," which dropped in June 2025 as a single off her third album:
Why this one is a today-days-old moment:
- She's a two-time Grammy winner at 26. Her second album, Bewitched (2023), won Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album at the 66th Grammys in 2024. Her third album, A Matter of Time (2025), won the same category at the 68th Grammys in 2026. That's the Tony Bennett / Michael Bublé / Barbra Streisand category — and she's won it twice in a row before her 27th birthday.
- She plays cello, piano, and guitar, and she trained classically. She went to the Reykjavík College of Music, then graduated from Berklee College of Music in 2021, where she studied cello with Mike Block. Before her solo career, she was a young soloist with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Her live shows often feature her on cello mid-song, which is not a thing most Top 40 stars can pull off.
- Her discography so far: Everything I Know About Love (August 2022), Bewitched (September 2023), and A Matter of Time (August 2025). Three albums, and each one charted higher than the last. The hits you've probably heard without knowing who sang them: "From the Start," "Valentine," "Falling Behind," "Silver Lining," and "Lover Girl."
- She is, weirdly, a TikTok star. This is the part that makes her genuinely interesting as a cultural moment. Laufey sings torch songs and bossa nova in a style that is objectively out of step with commercial pop — and somehow her clips go viral on TikTok with teenagers. It's not ironic. A huge Gen Z audience is listening to arrangements their grandparents would recognize, and this is apparently fine with them. Critics have spent three years arguing about whether this means "jazz is back," "jazz never left," or "this isn't really jazz." Meanwhile she keeps filling theaters.
- The accolades keep coming. Time magazine named her one of their Women of the Year for 2025. In January 2026 the Icelandic government awarded her the Knight's Cross of the Order of the Falcon — one of the country's highest civilian honors. For context, the last musician to get that at her age was... basically nobody.
The "today days old" angle: the algorithm has probably already served you a Laufey song without giving you her name. If you've scrolled TikTok or Reels in the last two years, you've heard "From the Start" or "Lover Girl" behind someone else's video. Now you know who it is — and once you know, the back catalog is three full albums deep and genuinely worth the trip.
Where to start:
- laufey.com — tour dates, news, merch.
- YouTube: @laufey — official music videos and live sessions.
- Spotify / Apple Music: search "Laufey." Start with Bewitched if you want the Grammy album; A Matter of Time if you want the newest one with "Lover Girl" on it.
- Live: she tours regularly with a full band (and her cello).
The best part: nothing about her feels manufactured. She writes her own songs, plays her own instruments, runs her creative team with her twin sister, and won two Grammys for doing jazz-shaped music in a pop-shaped world. It's one of the more interesting quiet stories in music right now.