In the somber and alone hours of the night, I found myself sinking into A Matter of Time, Laufey’s long-awaited third album, released on August 22, 2025. Her voice nestled beside me like a confidante from another era—elegant yet disarmingly modern. Where I’d hoped to stay present, stunned by the pull of the music, I found instead a portal into lives I never imagined living.

From the whimsical “Clockwork,” where she wryly jokes, “like me, he probably had to regurgitate,” to the deep orchestral sorrow of “Snow White,” where she sings, “A woman’s best currency’s her body, not her brain,” Laufey shifts from playful nostalgia into emotional reckoning. Lyrically and sonically, A Matter of Time is Laufey’s boldest bloom yet—a melding of modern realities and vintage grandeur, and through it, I found something achingly human looking back.

Following the success of Bewitched, the international songbird continues to cement herself as the face of the modern jazz revival. Produced alongside longtime collaborator Spencer Stewart, Aaron Dessner, and with arrangements from the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, the record balances intimacy with grandeur. Where her debut Everything I Know About Love captured the innocence of young romance, and Bewitched painted love as something timeless and enchanted, A Matter of Time confronts the rawer edges of growing up—anger, vulnerability, disillusionment, and self-reckoning. The result is an album that widens her palette beyond jazz revivalism, blending orchestral pop and classical influences while still keeping her signature storytelling voice at the center.

On the album cover, Laufey reclines in an elegant dress before the face of a clock. Her legs angle outward like clock hands, as though she herself were the instrument that turns time forward. It’s a striking image, suggesting not only that she embodies the passage of time but also that she will be the one to guide listeners through it. “Clockwork,” the opening track, makes this symbolism explicit. Playful in its wit yet purposeful in its design, it acts as the overture to the record, preparing us to experience each song as a moment on that dial. By the time the album has run its course, Laufey has carried us through the hours—through humor, through sorrow, through longing—and left us with the sense that time itself has been bent by her voice.

For me, the centerpiece of the record is “Snow White.” Listening to this piece, I am born into this same world as some different person—a girl instead of a boy, and assuredly never able to reach the impossible Snow White expectation that Laufey sings of. When she declares, “The world is a sick place, at least for a girl,” the words cut straight through me as her voice extended in emphasis on, “girl.” The lyric hit like a revelation, not because it belonged to me, but because for a moment it did. Through her voice I imagined what it might mean to measure myself against an impossible ideal, to live under a gaze that is never kind enough, never forgiving enough. For a moment, her song blurred the line between my life and another’s, and I wasn’t just listening to a track; I was inhabiting the pain of expectation.

I wasn’t just listening to a track; I was inhabiting the pain of expectation.

“A Cautionary Tale” plays like the album’s epic. Opening with the invocation “Oh Heavens, hear my story,” the track positions itself almost like a fable, pulling from the language of myth to frame a very human heartbreak. Sung from the girl’s perspective, it tells of a lover who drained her joy, moved through life guiltlessly, and took her for granted. A simple tale that existed in times of old and just as surely exists today. The ballad is also elevated by its classical framing and story-telling, as though Laufey is casting this failed relationship as part of a timeless cycle of love and ruin.

If “A Cautionary Tale” reaches back into the past, casting heartbreak in the cadence of myth, then “Clean Air” snaps us firmly into the present. Laufey opens the song in a familiar place for all listeners—where I happened to be listening—the bedroom. This is a beautifully simple preface for listeners, especially as we return from being whisked away to “A Cautionary Tale”. 

When she sings, “Now sweeter pastures, wait for me like a lover,” it lands as both promise and prayer—a glimpse of hope lying just ahead. The song feels like standing on the green side of “the grass is greener,” a rare moment when desire isn’t for what’s missing but for what is here. That, to me, is what living in the present feels like. I attached myself closely to this track because I believe living in the present is paramount to living a happy life, and Laufey manages to capture that philosophy with startling simplicity. In “Clean Air,” time doesn’t spiral or collapse—we have the agency to control it, to control the sufferings of life and take a nice big breath of fresh air.

The album closes with “Sabotage,” a song that refuses to resolve Laufey’s story neatly. It feels like a beautiful thematic bookend, as she reprises the title of the record by admitting it is only a matter of time before she sabotages herself. Laufey also brilliantly constructs this concept into her work, as each time she utters the word “Sabotage,” chaotic symphonies ensue, purposefully disrupting the softness of the song. The effect is jarring and self-destructive, yet it is precisely in that collapse that the album finds its most honest truth. Humans are not gifted resolution—clocks and expiration dates exist on every man-made technicality, and their downfall just so happens to also only be a matter of time.

And so, as the record closes, I found myself back where I started—in my bedroom, alone with her voice. The clock on my wall ticked forward, and time itself felt reconsidered, unraveled, and remade. Laufey doesn’t resolve the story, and that is beautifully the point. Life is never as clean as a cadence; it falters, it sabotages, and surprises. There is only more life to live. And as time moves forward, and more experiences like the ones storied in A Matter of Time unfold in our lives, perhaps we can move past “everybody falling in love” — and no longer feel so much like we’re falling behind.