A velvet curtain of sound. Not a show, not a performance—a whisper of something from another time, folded into the present like it belongs here, like it was always waiting. Laufey doesn’t arrive; she settles into the Roundhouse as if she had always been there, tucked into the rafters, humming along to the distant echo of a Billie Holiday record. “Fragile” is not just an opening song but a breath exhaled before words begin, the kind that dissolves the distance between the stage and the space in your chest where old wounds are stitched and re-stitched. The hush of the audience isn’t stillness; it’s reverence, it’s collective longing held together by the thread of her voice.
The sound is warm, sepia-toned, like a melody plucked from a lost decade, an antique store melody tucked inside a jewelry box. The guitar is light, fingers tracing the frets like reading an old letter, one that smells faintly of perfume and regret. The strings hover, waiting to swell, to rise—but they never quite do. Everything about Laufey’s music resists modern urgency. She sings in spaces between notes, where emotions linger instead of resolve.
And then, like a change in season, the shift. “Valentine.” The way her voice catches on the edge of the word like it’s something too precious to hold for long. The room exhales. Laughter, recognition. A shared understanding that this one has been lived in by everyone here, turned over like a lucky coin in a pocket. There is lightness now, a bounce in the melody, in the crowd, in the hands that move instinctively to the rhythm like they are adjusting their grip on something slippery and sweet.
She plays the piano like it might respond, like it might talk back if she presses just the right key. “Let You Break My Heart Again” arrives not with grand gestures but with the slow, inevitable creep of nostalgia. The audience knows this one too well—knows it from late-night playlists, from moments staring out of rain-streaked windows pretending to be in a film where longing is the main character. There is no need to be dramatic when the song does it for you. A bowed string swells and it is enough to undo the room. The way she holds a note just a fraction longer than expected—a trick, a tease, a lesson in restraint.
Every song a different kind of ache, a different shade of blue.
The setlist does not progress; it drifts, like ink swirling into water. “While You Were Sleeping” arrives as a dream you wake from too soon, a lullaby that doesn’t comfort so much as haunt. Laufey herself never forces a moment; she lets them unfold. She lets the audience come to her, to lean in, to get lost in the spaces between her syllables.
And then: “From the Start.” A song like twirling skirts and rooftop dancing, like speaking your heart aloud before you’ve had time to edit it down to something less embarrassing. The contrast is perfect, a reminder that even heartbreak can be worn lightly, that even regret can be playful. The guitar flutters, the piano winks. The audience moves instinctively.
And at last—”Goddess.” If everything before was fragile, intimate, close, then this is the moment the room expands, breathes, lifts. The strings no longer hesitate; they rise, they soar. Laufey does not sing so much as declare, her voice stretching past the chandeliers, past the bricks that have seen decades of music before her. It is cinematic. It is pure spectacle. It is not an ending, just a moment suspended, hanging midair before the room plunges into darkness.
Applause is a disruption, an intrusion into something that wasn’t meant to be interrupted. The spell has broken. The lights return. The dream is over. But the notes linger, somewhere, in the air, in the bones.
A concert? No. A slow waltz through a memory you haven’t had yet, but will revisit again and again, long after the final note has faded away.
Words & photos – Richard Isaac
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