★★★★★

“Everything I Know About Love” by Laufey is a dreamy, orchestral journey through the mundane beauty of life, told through the reflective lens of a perceptive young woman.

The Icelandic singer’s debut album features a heavy jazz influence, with her soulful tone guiding the listener through each song. Amid trumpet serenades and light guitar accompaniments, Laufey details the little moments in life through the rose-colored glasses we use to reminisce. 

Laufey first gained prominence through TikTok with her song “Valentine.” The simplistic guitar ballad gained attention for its enchanting lyricism about life’s sudden changes, exemplified through Laufey’s disbelief of her own love life on Valentine’s Day. Her album promised to emulate the same simplistic yet dreamy sensation, and it absolutely delivered.

“Beautiful Stranger,” the second track on the album, details the feeling of falling in love with a stranger for a few moments before going about your day. If you have ever shot fleeting glances at someone across the dining hall or on the metro, you will find yourself wandering back to that heart-fluttering experience with this song’s orchestral music plucked straight from a Disney movie.

In “What Love Will Do To You,” she again describes the sensation of being in love, imagining herself “in a haze” where “the world feels smaller, yet the trees feel taller.” With a pounding backbeat, the song differs from the lighter tracks and encapsulates the heavenly, nostalgic feeling of the entire album, driving her theme of the elusiveness of love straight into the heart. 

The entire album, however, cannot feel like running through a field of daisies with the love of your life, and the tenth track, “Falling Behind,” reminds the listener of that fact. The song’s swing style presents the perfect opportunity to dance, until Laufey hits you in the lonely heart with “everybody’s falling in love and I’m falling behind.” As you salsa around your kitchen, Laufey makes sure to remind you that you are doing it alone. 

In the same fashion, the closing track, “Night Light,” walks the listener through the process of packing up your childhood bedroom and moving away. It is a perfectly relevant song for anyone in college, designed to send you back in time to packing up for school. Listening to the piano accompaniment, you’ll imagine yourself in your empty room at home, staring at the remnants of your childhood. If you’re ever feeling homesick, I would not recommend listening to this song, but in true Laufey fashion, the vocals are too gorgeous to skip. 

What often makes music appealing is its ability to fit perfectly into a certain moment in your life, and Laufey’s album manages to accomplish that feat in each song. If you’ve experienced the romantic love she croons about, you’ll find bits and pieces of your own experience within hers, drawing you into the album and keeping you there until she lets you go. 

Her ability to create a modern jazz-esque album is extraordinary, as is the meticulous crafting of a track list that allows both the faster and slower tunes to blend together seamlessly. Despite some of her more cliché lines, Laufey makes up for them through the hypnotic, ethereal quality of both her vocals and instrumentation. 

Her debut album sets up a strong future for the singer, with her upcoming tour selling out across the United States. The universality of Laufey’s themes makes for a highly relatable collection of songs, while the jazz aspects of the otherwise modern album encapsulate the joys and anxieties of life and love.