Laufey wows the Hollywood Bowl in a show with the LA Phil: Review

If a team of aesthetically inclined scientists were able to recreate the perfect Hollywood Bowl performance, they might have found the 25-year-old Icelandic-Chinese-American sensation with the unique name Laufey. No one would actually think to create such an impossible checklist, but she ticks it anyway: A singer who would have looked at home on the same stage in the 1950s, but who appeals to a young demographic in the 2020s. A multi-instrumentalist with skills on electric guitar, piano, and cello. A romantic with a keen sense of seduction who feels tailor-made for a summer date. And, perhaps most importantly, she plays well with Thomas Wilkins and woodwinds.

Some are born for the mansion; in this respect, Laufey is born for the Bowl. Her triumphant debut Wednesday night at the venue, backed by a Wilkins-led LA Phil, probably seemed preordained from the moment she released her first EP just three years ago. It seemed especially obvious after Laufey made what appeared to be a test run in the summer of 2023, playing with the Philharmonic across the ravine at the much smaller Ford Amphitheater. With an avid following that had already outgrown the term “cult,” she could have filled the Bowl by the time she played the Ford 11 months ago. In fact, headlining the Bowl for just one night this year also felt like an understatement. It sold out so quickly—and even the cheapest resale tickets sold for such high prices—that it seemed clear Laufey could have pulled off a three-night run.

And yet she still flies under the radar of at least a portion of the music industry, let alone the general public, despite winning a Grammy this year, selling out shows from the Hollywood Hills to Radio City Music Hall, and generating IYKYK-level hysteria among her youngest and most loyal followers. Perhaps that’s almost as it should be, for an artist whose nostalgic sound isn’t for everyone. Would Brigadoon seem just as special if the whole world took notice of her sporadic performances?

Although Laufey typically tours with a small band and, more recently, a string quartet, this wasn’t her first time playing with an orchestra this month. The previous Friday, she had performed with the Chicago Philharmonic at Lollapalooza, marking the first time the festival had featured a symphonic performance. But West Coast Laufey devotees definitely had the better end, at least in terms of volume. While in Chicago she was only able to play 15 numbers, in LA she was able to play a full “evening with” — repeating Lolla’s full 15-song orchestral set for the second half of the show, but starting it off with an additional 11-song warmup set with her usual combo before intermission.

The best should largely be saved for last, or at least the second act, but the first movement offered a nice glimpse into some of Laufey’s most youthful songs, including some she may have outgrown in the extremely short period of time between her early and mid-20s. “Slow Down,” she explained, is a song she rarely plays anymore, but was particularly well-suited to a concert in her now-hometown of LA—written when she moved here into her first post-parental leave and Berklee apartment and worried that life might already be going by too fast. (Apparently, she’s gotten over it.) Song titles like “Everything I Know About Love” and “Dear Soulmate” reflect a kind of knowing naivety or ambitious approach to romance that the Laufey of 2024 may have already left behind, but isn’t long in the rearview mirror to revive. Most charmingly of this first section was that she brought her twin sister Junia along as a “best friend.” As it turns out, not only is she her graphic designer/doppelgänger, but she’s also an avid violinist—a sweet testament to their bond that resulted in some funny faces from both of them.

That could have been a reasonable headlining gig on its own, but most of the real magic was reserved for the Phils-enhanced set, for which Laufey traded in her black skirt and white go-go boots for a more flamboyant, pretty pink outfit that could be seen from the back rows (and possibly space) of the Bowl. That set began with her most overtly nostalgic and “sweet” number—”Dreamer,” the title track from her 2023 album Bewitched—before Laufey settled mostly into the kind of languid, lovesick material that is her best tool of the trade. She has a lot of love songs in her arsenal, and there’s nothing like the LA Phil at their most understated to throw just enough tinder on her unrequital to start a nice fire.

Laufey can also sing songs about reciprocated love, and she’s got enough years under her belt now to speak from experience. The song “Valentine,” which was about the surprise of falling in love, fell into that category, and the color-coordinated crowd at the Bowl responded by holding up both red and white glowing phones to the singer’s delight. But her songs about feeling shut out of love are just so good that you can’t help but hope it wasn’t just a phase for her. One of the wonderful things about Laufey is that some of her melancholy ballads feel timeless and demographic-less, while others – perhaps the majority of them – have lyrical phrases or references that connect them to the sensibilities of a woman in her twenties in the present day. It’s a bit like Frank pining after Ava, if you can imagine Frank and Ava as university students worrying about the impossibility of love in between finishing their finals.

Laufey has a Taylor Swift side to her, or at least a Keely Smith-meets-Swift side. The biggest outlier in her still-thin catalog so far is “Goddess,” the subtitle song to her recent deluxe package, “Bewitched: Goddess Edition.” Performed with Laufey on piano, the singer lamented quite openly—to the point of using a not-very-nostalgic F-word—about her experience of feeling taken advantage of as a celebrity in a romantic relationship, and it was the only number of the night where she intentionally incorporated a hook into her otherwise flawless contralto voice for emotional impact. This song offered a possible glimpse into Laufey’s future if she opts for a rawer emotional sensibility that some young music fans know all too well.

But from that poignant number, Laufey went straight into the most lighthearted song of the night, a short, jaunty cover of the Jimmy Van Heusen classic “It Could Happen to You,” during which she put down her instruments and danced around the stage. Assuming the abrupt contrast was intentional, it was Laufey’s way of encapsulating her versatility… and perhaps also her way of reassuring her fan base that her darker confessionals will never displace her love of Great American Songbook-style stuff, whether it’s covers or her own original versions of it.

Highlights included the numerous numbers that ended with Laufey moving from center stage to a waiting spot at the cello to play a coda with a solo. When she was at the piano, the audience had a good chance of hearing something that leaned more toward her classically trained side, like “Promise” and “California and Me.” (It feels good to have material that evokes the Baroque but also mentions Melrose Avenue.) When she plays her electric guitar, it often means everyone gets to hear something with a slight hint of bossa nova—or a very obvious attempt, as on the closing “From the Start.”

Demographics are a fun topic to discuss at a Laufey concert… and at the Hollywood Bowl they were a little different than at other LA performances she’s done. At many of her performances, she inspired Swiftie-like screams between songs and loud sing-alongs during numbers. And for someone so familiar with the classics of the ’40s and ’50s, her audience, somewhat surprisingly, was almost entirely under-30s, and especially under-25s. In Southern California at least, you could count on an audience that was not only young, but at least half Asian, and many of them practically dressed up as Laufey and mimicked her signature style. A big element of that was on display at the Bowl; looking around as the crowd filed in, it seemed like about one in four young women had a telltale bow in their hair, something you don’t see at every LA concert.

But the Bowl also featured something unusual and different: old people. (By that, we mean people over 30, and yes, even a good portion over 50.) Ever since our review of the Ford show last summer, we’ve maintained that older people love Laufey and probably already like her records—but that they might never get a chance to come to her shows if trigger-happy Gen Z fans buy up all the tickets as soon as they go on sale. Here at Hollywood’s most venerable venue, however, there’s an older crowd that got the box seats first—and apparently they’d developed enough affection for Laufey, too, that they wouldn’t give them up, even if there were young fans willing to pay several times face value to get them on StubHub.

So the audience on Wednesday had the somewhat odd effect of being a little quieter in the first half than in the second. This was not necessarily a bad thing: Much of Laufey’s material does Calling for silence so loud you could hear a pin drop. It was just funny to hear more of the roar at other moments, mostly coming from behind. And when it got to the point in “From the Start” where Laufey’s crowd inevitably joins in with her chant of “blah-blah-blah,” it was definitely louder up the hill.

But it’s a nice thing that AARP audiences also have a chance to enjoy Laufey, especially those with a trained ear for the kind of pre-rock classics that this one-time talent draws on for his own music. Sorry, Generation Z—you can’t keep those old-school tunes to yourself forever.

Laufey’s setlist at the Hollywood Bowl, August 7, 2024:

First half (volume only):
Above the Chinese restaurant
Street by street
Second best
Cursed
Everything I know about love
Slow
Dear soul mate
What love does to you
Best friend
Misty
Like in the movie
Letter to my 13-year-old self

Second half (with LA Phil):
dreamer
While you were sleeping
Falling back
Let you break my heart again
Fragile
Valentine’s Day
Beautiful Stranger
I wish you love
Promise
California and me
goddess
It could happen to you
In love with a witch
Bored
Lovesick
From the beginning