WWords of affirmation are important when you’re a young girl — and when Bill Murray Laufeny told Lín Jónsdóttir, the Grammy-winning jazz artist known as Rundey, that she was a “powerful woman” at 17, she took it to heart. “I remember being confused, too,” she recalls, now 25. “I hadn’t released any music at the time; I was just a nerdy little classical cello student.” Still, Murray turned out to be right.

Just four years later, the Icelandic-Chinese singer went viral on TikTok with her 1940s-inspired classic jazz songs, introducing Generation Z to the notoriously stuffy genre. The following year she released her brilliant debut album Everything I know about love. By 2023, Jónsdóttir had overtaken Björk and Sigur Rós as the most-streamed Icelandic artist and won the Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album award at the Grammys this year for her second album Bewitched – and all without the support of a major label.

Laufey’s songs are soothing yet mischievous, reflecting her background in classical music, with deep vocals that effortlessly slip into the booming low registers of the female jazz icons before her. “I would sing in public and everyone would say, ‘She has the voice of a divorcee in the body of a 13-year-old girl,'” says Jónsdóttir. “I have never felt pretty, light or young. I always felt very strange, different and heavy. I felt like a circus freak. It’s so overwhelming for a young girl to hear.”

This voice has since become her calling card. And now she’s putting it to good, if surprising, use with a collection of tinsel-tinged Christmas songs. Her soft, sing-song vocals can be heard throughout the Ella Fitzgerald-inspired single “Christmas Magic,” her EP A very nice holiday! and the two songs she recorded with nine-time Grammy winner Norah Jones. At the moment she has not one but three songs in the running for the No. 1 Christmas song in the UK.

“I feel like the singer of Actually love” she laughs, pointing to Bill Nighy’s down-and-out rock star Billy Mack, who spends the entire film promoting his award-winning seasonal title. Luckily, Jónsdóttir’s Christmas songs are a far cry from the moaning Christmas hits that are shoved down our throats every year. Instead, her models are sophisticated and elegant – in sepia tones, as if they came from a distant time. But the musician sitting in front of me today is present and grounded, chatting as if I were a friend stopping by for hot chocolate.

Christmas music can be tricky, I suggest. If you do it well, you don’t have to work the other 11 months of the year. Do it to Well, yes, and there is a risk that it will become everything you are known for. (See Mariah Carey and Michael Bublé). Online, some fans have described Jónsdóttir as Generation Z’s answer to the latter. “Oh my God,” she replies, sitting on a sofa in her sister’s London apartment. Her face is naked and framed by the loose curls of her chestnut brown hair. “As long as other people love my other music too, I’m happy to accept any kind of torch,” she says. “Of course I want to be taken seriously as a musician. I think you can do both.”

When it came time to shoot the music video for her cover of Eartha Kitt’s 1953 flirty classic “Santa Baby,” Jónsdóttir wanted a narrator who embodied the Christmas spirit – someone whose voice alone carried the scent of eggnog and peppermint -Conjures candy canes. “What strings can I pull?” She remembers thinking. Then Jónsdóttir remembered the man who had told her she was “powerful” all those years ago: Murray. She called him and, miraculously, the Hollywood star said yes. The finished product features an ethereal Jónsdóttir surrounded by ballerinas and giant Christmas trees, while Murray appears as the storyteller. It’s pure Christmas magic.

Jónsdóttir and her identical twin sister Júnía were born in Reykjavik to an Icelandic father and a Chinese mother and were raised to be musicians. Her mother was a violinist with the Island Symphony Orchestra, and her parents were professors of violin and piano at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Jónsdóttir got her first violin at the age of two. Piano lessons began at the age of four; Cello lessons, age eight. When she was a teenager, she competed Island has talentwhere she sang an absolutely perfect rendition of Alicia Keys’ “If I Ain’t Got You” and made it to the finals. Later she appeared The Voice of Iceland.

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After a peripatric upbringing that shuttled between America, Iceland and China, Jónsdóttir settled in Boston at the age of 19 to study at the prestigious Berklee College of Music, where she discovered jazz. “I have dedicated my entire life to classical music, trained to be the best musician possible, to play the piece best, to play the notes on the page best,” she says. “At Berklee the prize was completely different, it was about making music and not about what was written on the page.”

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This flexibility and rule-breaking is one of the reasons she fell in love with the genre. “Jazz is about that,” says Jónsdóttir. “It’s about bending things, breaking away from what’s on the page and improvising. I love hiding meanings in my lyrics. There’s nothing I love more than a song that sounds like it’s about walking around in a beautiful patch of grass with flowers, and it turns out to be a song about sex.” Her own lyrics are on playful in this way. On her jazz-pop breakout hit “Valentine,” Jónsdóttir sings, “I tell him he’s pretty too/Can I say that?” I have no idea,” and later, “I’m scared of flies, I’m scared in front of boys, someone please help.” The same tongue-in-cheek tone can be found everywhere in pop music this year, including on Sabrina Carpenter’s album Short and sweet peppered with double meanings and self-deprecating asides.

Where Jónsdóttir fits on the scale of jazz and new-gen pop is an endless debate. “I’ve never been a thing and there were definitely moments where I felt like I had to fit in and had nowhere to go,” she says. Her predominantly Generation Z fan base has helped Jónsdóttir stay confident in what she wants.

“I don’t think the need to conform to pop is as important anymore,” she says. “We’re not necessarily trying to make music for the radio. It’s not just a man who sits there and decides everything that happens like a gatekeeper.” The fact that she recently won diversityCrossover Artist of the Year is a testament to the changing times. “Everything is now decided by the audience,” says Jónsdóttir. “Gen Z likes to be different. Culture moves with those who are different. It’s always been that way.”

“Christmas Magic” is streaming on Amazon Music