Laufey Signs to Interscope and Verve After Seven Billion Streams as an Independent

After six years building one of contemporary music’s more quietly extraordinary careers without major-label backing, Laufey signs to Interscope and Verve Records, capping a run as an independent artist that produced three studio albums, two Grammy Awards and more than seven billion combined global streams.

The deal places her within Interscope Geffen A&M, the label group headed by chairman and CEO John Janick, according to The Music Network. It simultaneously puts her on the Verve Records roster alongside Jon Batiste, Samara Joy, Arooj Aftab and Diana Krall, a lineage that anchors her squarely within jazz’s contemporary mainstream, however loosely that genre tag has ever fitted an artist whose appeal cuts so consistently across formats and generations.

What Laufey Signs to Interscope Brings to the Table

The timing follows a period of sustained, almost relentless momentum. Her 70-date A Matter of Time global arena tour concluded on 12 September in Mexico City, where she performed to a sold-out crowd of more than 17,000. She is now working on new music. That tour promoted an album which, according to Billboard, reached No. 4 on the Billboard 200, a chart position that underscores just how far outside the traditional jazz audience her reach now extends.

Live performance has been a central pillar of her ascent. Multiple nights at Madison Square Garden and Crypto.com Arena, sets at the Hollywood Bowl, Radio City Music Hall and London’s Royal Albert Hall, and appearances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra and the China Philharmonic Orchestra have collectively built a concert profile that blends arena-pop logistics with a chamber sensibility that very few artists manage convincingly.

The Grammy record matters here too. She has won the award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album twice: first for 2023’s Bewitched and again for 2025’s A Matter of Time. Winning the same Grammy category in consecutive cycles is a consistency of recognition that speaks both to her commercial traction and to the Recording Academy’s appetite for her particular strand of neo-jazz.

Awards, Philanthropy and a Career That Resists Easy Categorisation

Her profile beyond the music has expanded considerably in the period leading up to this signing. In 2024, Variety honoured her at its annual Hitmakers event with the Crossover Artist of the Year award, presented by her close friend, British singer Raye, a pairing that speaks to the transatlantic character of her fanbase. She was subsequently named one of TIME’s 2025 Women of the Year, received Iceland’s Order of the Falcon from the country’s president, and became a New York Times best-selling author with her first children’s book, Mei Mei The Bunny.

Her philanthropic work is woven into the commercial machinery rather than running alongside it at a distance. In August, she staged the fourth annual “A Very Laufey Day,” a series of arts events held across 75 cities in more than 25 countries. Programming spanned symphony orchestras, ballet, jazz, opera and theatre, alongside a Candlelight concert series presented in 10 cities. Proceeds from brand collaborations and merchandise sales went to The Laufey Foundation, which supports access to music education and resources for young musicians.

She was raised between Reykjavik and Washington, D.C., studied piano and cello, and attended Berklee College of Music, where she wrote her 2021 debut EP, Typical of Me. Its single ‘Street by Street’ debuted at No. 1 on Icelandic radio. Collaborations with Barbra Streisand, Role Model, Beabadoobee and Norah Jones have since filled out a discography that resists the kind of genre tidiness that would make any label deal feel obvious or inevitable.

The Verve placement is the key detail. Founded on the recordings of Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson, Verve carries a specific weight of jazz history that a signing to a straightforward pop imprint would not. Whether that heritage proves a creative frame or merely a marketing convenience will likely become clear when the new music arrives.