Following a Grammy for her second album, Bewitched, singer-songwriter Laufey’s A Matter of Time tour explores a new side of herself. Suki Waterhouse opened the Montreal tour stop with ethereal vocals, priming the audience for Laufey; both artists delivered outstanding performances at Place Bell on Oct. 21st. From the first musical notes of “Clockwork,” Laufey invited the crowd on an intimate exploration of her being, translating the vulnerability of her album into a compelling performance.
Laufey’s earlier work often explored youthful, innocent, and almost-naive love through a unique jazz-pop musical style that infused her lyrics with a dreamlike quality. A Matter of Time intentionally subverts these expectations by revealing an honest sincerity. While love remains a major inspiration for Laufey—particularly after entering her first relationship, experiencing the love she had long sung about—her third album does not shy away from some of the more unsavoury experiences of her life. These include the pain of losing a friend, insecurities, and homesickness for Iceland, where she grew up.
In an interview with TIME, Laufey explained what motivated the risk she took with her album: “I wanted to take this idea of beauty that’s often around my music and throw it in the fire a little bit, just for the sake of showing the complexity of female emotion.”
The dichotomy between A Matter of Time and Bewitched can be seen in the way she treats the theme of insecurities. “Letter to my 13 Year Old Self,” from her second album Bewitched, explores the central theme of physical insecurities. Sung to her younger self, who felt like an outsider growing up half-Chinese in Iceland, Laufey comforts and affirms the child’s appearance.
“Snow White,” released as a single earlier this year, is a cynical, dispiriting song about how Laufey feels inferior because of the unreachable standards of female beauty. The lyric, “Sometimes I see her, she looks like Snow White,” reveals her tendency to compare herself to an impossible, idealized image of femininity. The stage was decorated with mirrors and lit in dark blues and pinks; the performance let the audience bear witness to her harsh internal feelings as she embodied her own worst critic. While “Letter to my 13 Year Old Self” explores the same central theme of physical insecurities, the careful sympathy and solace she offers herself is nowhere to be found in “Snow White,” which is marked with a hard-edged pessimism. However, with “Letter to my 13 Year Old Self” as the last performance of the night, Laufey left the audience on a positive note as she fulfilled her childhood hopes and dreams of performing on stage.
“Sabotage,” the first song Laufey composed for A Matter of Time, is especially unique in its sound, as it intermittently inserts brief bouts of orchestral cacophony to convey personal anxiety. It’s “a song about the fear of losing someone, because you’re in your own head,” she explained to The Grammys. Her on-stage performance mirrored that anxiety, with the lights flashing erratically when the musical dissonances interrupted her singing. In personifying the anxiety she felt in a romantic relationship, she replicates a dread that many can relate to. Laufey captures the feeling of knowing that her own overthinking and anxiety about a relationship could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
By the end of the night, Place Bell had become a collective diary, where heartbreak, nostalgia, homesickness, and self-discovery intertwined. Her ability to transform authenticity into music left the audience spellbound long after her final notes.
