Fresh off her Coachella performance last night, Laufey kicked off the week with the release of her star-studded music video, “Madwoman,” featuring The Summer I Turned Pretty star Lola Tung, Olympian Alysa Liu, Katseye’s Megan Skiendiel, and Heated Rivalry’s Hudson Williams. (Actresses Havana Rose Liu and Chase Sui Wonders also make sneaky appearances.) The ’60s-themed music video depicts the group at Laufey’s fabulous house as she decides to overlook the red flags she notices in Williams’s character—a charming but dangerous heartthrob—and pursue a relationship with him. She has second thoughts once he proposes, but a final, chilling twist shows she may literally be trapped at a dead end.
The video is full of glamorous looks and cheeky eye candy. At one point, Laufey slaps Williams with a fish, causing him to fall into the swimming pool—only to climb out of it shirtless as the women around him gawk.
Last May, Laufey spoke to ELLE about her third studio album, A Matter of Time. (“Madwoman” was just released as a track from the deluxe version of the album.)
She shared her response to some jazz purists saying her music doesn’t fit the genre. “At the end of the day, what are genres?” she asked. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to fit into some sort of box. Am I a classical musician, a jazz musician? Am I Icelandic? Am I Chinese? Am I American? I’ve never been able to fit into a box. So I’m trying to distance myself from that. I think that’s quite old-fashioned.”
Laufey also spoke more broadly about the importance of representation, noting that as she was growing up, “I always loved pop music; I just didn’t think I could make it. I distinctly remember these girls dressing up as Hannah Montana for Halloween and me thinking, ‘Oh, I can’t, because I have dark hair.’ It’s so simple when you’re a kid. You look at someone and you’re like, ‘This is not a reflection of who I am. I love it, but I can’t be them for Halloween.’”
She continued, “I think about that moment more and more as I grow older and I grow further into this career, because I’m like, ‘That’s it. That’s the representation that matters.’ I believed that I could be a classical musician because I saw so many older women who were doing that, who looked like me and had similar backgrounds. But I didn’t see a single woman in pop music. No one cool, no one who stepped onstage in a fun outfit that I got to try to copy, or whose lyrics I could really listen to and have them resonate with me, because no one was writing about those experiences….I write a lot about the experience of being the only Asian girl in my class, in my year, in Iceland, and feeling really odd. This pressure of being perfect, I think that’s something that’s pushed a lot upon Asian kids and Asian Americans especially. My music is a lot about that push and pull of doing the right thing, but feeling the wrong thing. But I really do think it’s as simple as, ‘Oh, hey, I also celebrate Chinese New Year.’
“I didn’t have an Asian community like that growing up, and now I have it, and it’s through my music,” she continued. “That’s another reason I love living in L.A. and I love living in the States. I get to be Asian.”
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