Laufey: Bewitched [AWAL]

Why you'll love it

This LP comes in a gatefold jacket with a 16-page booklet of photos, lyrics and credits. Bewitched won Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album at the 66th Grammy Awards, and "From The Start" became Laufey's first song on the international charts.

This edition

• Gatefold jacket
• 16-page booklet with lyrics and photos
• Obi strip
• Pressed in the Czech Republic

About the album

Watch your backs, Norah Jones and Diana Krall. There's a potential new queen of smoother-than-smooth jazz-pop storming the gates. Young Icelandic singer and "reality"-TV grad Laufey (she was on Iceland's version of Got Talent and The Voice Iceland but, hey, there's just so much population to go around out there in the North Atlantic) made serious inroads towards breakout mainstream success with her second album proper, Bewitched, in 2023.

As Pitchfork put it, this album is "bolder and more intentional" than her debut, Everything I Know About Love, and "here, Laufey doesn't simply let jazz inform the work; she uses it as a vehicle to enact fantasies and ambitions, lending her contemporary musings a misty, out-of-time quality." The album spawned four singles, with "From The Start" leading the way. She even covers "Misty" so you know she means business.

Laufey wrote most of it with Spencer Stewart, and the pair produced it with Dan Wilson and the Philharmonia Orchestra, which explains the lush strings on "California And Me." It went on to top jazz charts around the world. Ms. Jones and Ms. Krall have, as far as we know, taken the news graciously.

Also at Kops: more Laufey on vinyl · browse Modern Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On AWAL (cat# LAULP003), the 2023 album.