Review: Pop star transforms massive arena into intimate supper club

Laufey was standing in front of a packed crowd of some 12,000 adoring fans at Oakland Arena. Yet, an arena-rock show wasn’t quite the vibe she was looking for. Instead, she had something else in mind.

“Welcome to my jazz club,” said the Icelandic pop star, whose recently released third album — “A Matter of Time” — does indeed currently sit atop Billboard’s Jazz Albums chart.

Truth be told, however, there wasn’t much jazz to be heard on this night. Anyone who thinks otherwise should have been at the Monterey Jazz Festival over the weekend and heard Dianne Reeves or Rene Marie — now that’s jazz vocal work.

Monday’s show was more an evening of traditional pop vocals — which is the album category where Laufey’s previous album, “Bewitched,” triumphed at the 2024 Grammys — but with a decidedly vintage twist. And people often confuse vintage with jazz, despite the latter being a living, breathing and developing art form that is still going strong in 2025.

However we want to categorize Laufey (pronounced LAY-vay), the fact is that she’s got a sound that has deeply — and quite unexpectedly — connected with younger listeners.

To an older listener, her songs may sound like standards — ones that, somehow, have remained hidden to the public since the ’30s and ’40s. Of course, that would be a very good trick, since Laufey is still just 26-years old — and these are original compositions. A younger listener might not associate her sound to standards, but rather just intuitively realize that Laufey is connecting through her music to another time and place.

In her first of two consecutive nights in the Bay Area — with a stop at Chase Center in San Francisco set for Monday — Laufey was trying to balance a lot of different elements as she took the stage at around 8:50 p.m. to perform a nearly two-hour show.

She’s cultivating that whole jazz/supper club vibe, but doing so with a string section that brings a lush symphonic feel, while also working a big stage with pop-music production elements (a castle setting as a backdrop, a four-member dance crew, a secondary stage connected to the main one via catwalk, etc.).

Yet, it all managed to come together nicely as the show opened like “Clockwork” in something resembling an old Busby Berkeley musical number — kids, ask your grandparents — as the star worked in front of the castle-like set complete with two grand curving staircases and accompanying dancers dressed up in outfits resembling old-school cigarette girls.

It was straight-up 1930s supper club meets fairytale fantasy land, a weird combo that somehow served as the perfect setting for Laufey to spin her intoxicating tales of lost love, self reflection and other highly relatable topics for listeners of any age.

Her vocals are often likened to Ella Fitzgerald — a lofty comparison if there ever was one, but also one that I can’t hear in the slightest — and there are plenty of Norah Jones references, which also don’t fit like a glove.

It’s probably better to just shelf all those comparisons and just enjoy Laufey for what she is — a versatile singer with a medium-sized voice, who deals her words with subtle conviction, and allows lyrical moments to linger in just the right proportion. She’s about touch and feel, rather than power and range.

And, above all else, she’s about connecting with the crowd. She does so in song, for sure, but also in the way she simply chats up her fans in a fashion that feels more like a pajama party than a concert.

“It’s OK,” she remarked about all the talking onstage in Oakland. “Its like a chat — a big chat room.”

Conversely, Laufey can also seem to completely lose herself in a song — as if she’s crooning, not to a crowd of 12,000, but rather just to herself.

“Sometimes I’m in my element and I look up and I’m like ‘Oh, there are people watching — a lot of people,” she confessed.

Besides crooning through some two-dozen numbers, Laufey took the time to showcase her prowess on both guitar and cello — the latter of which came into play when the artist took to the small secondary stage to perform the instrumental “Cuckoo Ballet,” while, appropriately enough, a pair of dancers showed off their ballet moves.

She’d also sit down at the piano for what would turn out to be one of the best moments of the night.

“This next song is a little bit dramatic,” Laufey said as an introduction to the gorgeous tearjerker “Too Little, Too Late.” “But I tend to do that.”

The crowd was still very much behind the star as she reached the homestretch, filling up the latter portion of the show with such winners as “Goddess,” “Tough Luck,” “Snow White” and “From the Start.”

“Are you having fun?” asked Laufey, who immediately received her answer — very much in the affirmative — from the enthusiastically vocal crowd. “Thank God. It would be so embarrassing if you weren’t.”

Suki Waterhouse opened the concert with her own roughly half-hour set of fun pop songs. The singer — who is in a relationship with A-list actor Robert Pattinson — did a great job warming the crowd up for Laufey as she moved through such likable cuts as “Moves,” “To Love” and “Good Looking.”

“It’s been such an honor to get to do this every night,” Waterhouse remarked of getting to open for Laufey on this tour.

Laufey setlist

1. “Clockwork”
2. “Lover Girl”
3. “Dreamer”
4. “Falling Behind”
5. “Silver Lining”
6. “Bored”
7. “Too Little, Too Late”
8. “Bewitched”
9. “Seems Like Old Times”
10. “Valentine”
11. “Fragile”
12. “While You Were Sleeping”
13. “Let You Break My Heart Again”
14. “Carousel”
15. “Forget-Me-Not”
16. “Cuckoo Ballet”
17. “Mr. Eclectic”
18. “Castle in Hollywood”
19. “Promise”
20. “Goddess”
21. “Tough Luck”
22. “Snow White”
23. “From the Start”
24. “Sabotage”
Encore:
25. “I Wish You Love”
26. “Letter to My 13 Year Old Self”