Never one to pass up a shot at melodic fusion, Laufey Jónsdóttir knows the potency of a 90-piece orchestral arrangement. The Icelandic cello soloist-turned-singer-songwriter’s discography is lush with evidence of her compositional dexterity, and her newest release, “A Matter of Time: The Final Hour,” is no exception. The album’s “final hour,” comprising five new songs released on April 10, completes an hour-long album of Laufey’s musings released 6 months earlier, melding bossa nova, jazz, classical, indie and pop influences to settle on a sound that’s completely unique.
Compositionally, “A Matter of Time: The Final Hour” holds Laufey’s richest soundscapes yet. She makes masterful use of sparkling jazz beats, yawning string sections and precise dissonance to supplement her songs with a fullness that was absent from “Bewitched.” “Carousel” showcases especially gorgeous construction — dainty bells and piano dance in a waltzing push-and-pull, accenting the gentleness of Laufey’s serenade. In the more upbeat “Castle in Hollywood,” repetition of staccato strings builds the chorus up to support the growing tension in Laufey’s voice, and their smooth progression makes the emotional arc of her heartbreak feel entirely natural.
On the other end of the spectrum, “Forget-Me-Not” leans into a slow cadence to form an angelic lullaby, into which Laufey’s Icelandic verse slips seamlessly every time. While subtle and backgrounded, cellos create a velvety base for Laufey’s voice and fluttery flute segments, evoking a frozen fairytale wonderland, ethereal and untouchable.
Though the album varies in rhythm and temper, Laufey builds for each song its own meticulously constructed aesthetic. In the case of “Lover Girl,” this is a flirty bossa nova that, particularly in the mainstream music space, is made delightfully unique by castanets, claps and precisely placed pauses.
Laufey’s most charming worldbuilding in this album is found in the music video of “Madwoman,” another coquettish bossa nova track. ‘60s-style shift dresses, oversized earrings, headbands and knee high boots run right in line with the genre’s own maximalism, and the film’s color grading transports viewers straight to her suburban garden party. The video features an iconic cast, exclusively Wasian like Laufey herself — Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu, KATSEYE’s Megan Skiendiel, Lola Tung from “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” Havana Rose Liu from “Bottoms” and Hudson Williams from “Heated Rivalry.” These selections — along with her smooth integration of Chinese elements like qipaos into otherwise retro costuming — reveal Laufey’s savvy curation of both her own and her music’s public image to capitalize on the fusion niche her audience knows and loves.
When Laufey ventures past her familiar soundscapes, though, is when she starts stumbling. Taking risks has worked out for Laufey before — it’s what fueled the honeyed, jazzy sound that propelled her virality in 2023. However, “A Matter of Time: The Final Hour” is interspersed with experimental flops: “Clockwork” is Muzak-like and overly Christmasy, “Too Little, Too Late” trudges lethargically through four minutes of ballad and “Sabotage” stages frightening, aggressive clips of string section jumpscares. There’s also “Clean Air,” an unlistenable, rustic attempt at country that feels, down to its tactless f-bomb drops (“Lord knows I’ve suffered, get the f— out of my atmosphere”), indistinguishable from a bad Taylor Swift b-side. Both compositionally questionable and thoroughly incompatible with Laufey’s vocal tone, it would be a unanimous skip even in the most tolerant of Oregon Coast road-tripping minivans.
When creating “A Matter of Time,” Laufey described striving to be “a little weirder and a little more surreal” with her work. But as the album progresses, this experimentation becomes her most enduring issue. Laufey excels at what she’s known for — glittering, jazzy love songs and the occasional cello-backed ballad — but so far seems unequipped to handle anything more unfamiliar.
Throughout “A Matter of Time,” Laufey’s simplistic lyricism is also persistently weak: her diaristic contemplations can be cute when cradled in sassy jazz, but feel sophomoric when she tries to reach deeper emotionally. She often sacrifices internal logic for emotional catharsis, reaching gracelessly for profundity in a way that feels unwieldy and unearned.
For example, “Snow White” is one of Laufey’s rare attempts at subject matters beyond romance, and her articulation is clearly out of practice. Here, she oscillates between two distinct ideas — the first, that the world holds her to impossible, cruel beauty standards (“The world is a sick place, at least for a girl / The people want beauty, skinny always wins”), and the second, that the world exalts her beauty but she’s dysmorphic nonetheless (“They try to tell me, tell me I’m wrong / But mirrors tell lies to me, my mind just plays along”). The concepts are conflated in a way that feels confusing and paradoxical, like Laufey’s just hoping that at least one will be relatable enough for listeners to ignore the discrepancy.
Even when relaying her bread-and-butter romantic musings, Laufey’s metaphors largely remain simple and her rhymes even simpler. In “I’ll Forget About You (In Time),” she tackles a breakup with all the subtlety of a pining 12-year-old, lamenting, “I feel ruined / ‘Cause you treated me so awfully / I don’t know what you saw in me / You’ve brokеn me / I don’t believе I’ll fall in love again.” After four complete albums, Laufey still seems unable to overcome this unsophistication, relying almost exclusively on instrumentation to buoy her tracks.
Although these failed attempts at artistic growth dilute the album’s strengths, the songs in which Laufey plays to her skillset stand out on their own. Her consistency at delivering harmonic textures continues to scaffold the rest of her work, and the occasional successful experiment, like “Forget-Me-Not”’s Icelandic inclusions and symphonic backing, sustains hope that Laufey could grow into new styles. In order to do that, though, she’ll need to gradually build off of her successes, not throw banjo-backed adlibs at the wall, hoping they’ll stick.
RATING: 3/5
