Start a Youtube Channel. Catch Fire on Jazztok. Drop a divorce EP. There’s a new way to make music, and, as these viral singers show, the rule-breakers are reaping the rewards. ELLE meets the new age female musicians dominating our Spotify playlists.
Modern Jazz: Laufey
Jacket, top, jeans, scarf, sandals, earrings, bag and bag charm, all FENDI.
When Laufey looks out at her fans from the stage, she sees an audience full of ‘direct reflections’ of herself. They’re funny, they’re kind, they’re making friends with fellow fans, some even look and dress like her. ‘Growing up, I struggled with finding a group of people that I understood and that understood me,’ Laufey, 26, says. ‘The fact that I’ve kind of summoned an audience of exactly that – it makes my younger self really, really happy.’ She’s aware that fanbases – hers are called Lauvers – can exhibit over-the-top behaviour but, she says, even though her followers are ‘definitely, in a way, a cult, it’s a positive, happy, cute one’.
The Icelandic-Chinese musician, full name Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir (pronounced ‘lay-vay’ in English), is a Berklee College of Music grad who plays the piano, guitar, violin and cello, using her jazz and classical training to create a charming spin on pop. She’s attracted Gen-Z fans, who edit fancams of her and her twin sister/creative director Junia, and flock to see her play. ‘I always hope that my music is a gateway for people to get to know jazz,’ she says.
Last year, Laufey won her first Grammy – Traditional Pop Vocal Album – for 2023’s Bewitched. But she’s also received criticism from jazz purists who claim that her work isn’t true to the genre. ‘That couldn’t be further from the truth,’ she says. She struggled with the ‘ill-researched’ comments at first, but she’s learned to move on. ‘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 in a box. So I’m trying to distance myself from that. I think it’s quite old fashioned.’
Laufey’s fans have helped her feel a sense of belonging. ‘All I see is just a community of people that I wish I’d had when I was a little younger,’ she says. Many are Asian, like her. ‘It’s a loud sign that everyone needs representation. We love to see ourselves reflected in the artists we look up to.’ Her next record, expected this year, is a concept album about ‘a young woman unravelling’. It’ll explore Laufey’s messier side, one that’s hidden behind the frilly Rodarte dresses and Sandy Liang bows.
That’s clear on her romantic lead single, ‘Silver Lining’, in which she sings, ‘When you go to hell, I’ll go there with you, too.’ There’ll still be jazz and classical elements, but with bigger ‘pop sounds’ and a ‘more extroverted’ feel. After a childhood of performing classical music for ‘old people’, Laufey was surprised to play at concert halls and hear young voices sing back at her. Now she wants to earn it: ‘I want to make music worthy of singing along to.’ — ERICA GONZALES
New Country: Kelsea Ballerini
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‘There’s a saying in the music industry: “You have your whole life to make your first record and then two days in between tour dates to make your second.’” As she quotes this to me, Kelsea Ballerini, 31, is on tour herself. Backstage, she’s wrapped up in a grey tour hoodie, a rack of clothes and a white guitar behind her. It’s Valentine’s Day and, after polishing off a doughnut with pink sprinkles, she takes a break to talk to me on the anniversary of the day that changed her career.
Exactly two years before, she had released Rolling Up the Welcome Mat, a spiky six-song EP that chronicled her divorce from fellow country singer Morgan Evans in unsparing detail. For Ballerini, who grew up religious in Tennessee, the idea of divorce felt taboo, and dropping an album about it even more so. ‘I remember being like, “Oh man, I’m terrified.” I went to sleep, and the next morning I was like, “Oh, it’s OK. People are finding this and connecting with this.” But it was definitely a scary feeling.’ It also marked a watershed moment for Ballerini: between the explicitly autobiographical terrain she was mining, and the exploding market for country music in general, it introduced her to a whole new audience.
Now she has fans come to her concerts with signs reading, ‘Just got a divorce’. She cautions that, ‘I try to never celebrate it until I know if it’s a good thing. I don’t ever want to be a poster child for divorce. It’s been three years now. It’s simply not in the forefront of my life any more.’
These days, Ballerini is in a completely different headspace. Her personal life, she says, is ‘unrecognisable from how it was a couple of years ago, and thank God’. She’s been in a relationship with Outer Banks actor Chase Stokes for more than two years. Her most recent album Patterns is a more settled affair, one that she did indeed write parts of while she was on tour. Tracks like ‘Sorry Mom’, a mature apology to her mother, and ‘We Broke Up’, a resigned dismissal, are new territory for her, informed by the journey she’s been on in therapy.
This summer, she’ll finally have some downtime. Future album plans haven’t yet coalesced, but, she says, ‘I intend to do more genre blending. That excites me.’ She would ‘die’ to work with SZA, for one. Over the holidays a few years back, Ballerini says, she had dinner with her manager and asked: ‘“What’s my blind spot? Where can I be better?” And he said, “You need to stop acting like you’re new here.” So I’ve been trying to stand in my success more and not make myself smaller. I think that’s a lesson for all women – to be really proud of our wins.’ — VÉRONIQUE HYLAND
Latin Pop: Tini
Jacket, top and skirt, all McQUEEN. Earrings, CARTIER. Heels, CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN
There was a time when Argentinian Latin-pop idol Martina ‘Tini’ Stoessel, now 28, believed a Disney princess ought to keep her tears to herself. Starting in 2012, a then 14-year-old Tini led the Disney Channel Latin America drama Violetta as the titular Violetta Castillo, a girl whose pop-star aspirations mirrored her own. With echoes of Hannah Montana, the show became a global sensation, its influence stretching far outside her home of Buenos Aires. (As South African singer Tyla tweeted in January: ‘Violetta use to be my shiiiiiit.’) After the last episode in 2015, Tini decided launching a solo music career was the natural next step. ‘It was as simple as following my heart,’ she says. ‘What I felt when I finished Violetta was [the desire] to keep doing what I loved, but this time my way.’
Making music her way meant evolving, growing up and making mistakes in public view. In the decade that followed, Tini built a solo career, becoming one of Latin America’s favourite musicians. But she ignored her worsening mental health, putting on such a strong act that she nearly convinced herself she was thriving. That façade shattered in 2024, on the release of her sixth studio album, Un Mechón de Pelo (‘A Lock of Hair’). This music – her ‘most personal album’ yet – wasn’t a saccharine meditation on self-love; it was an introspective, experimental saga of isolation and depression.
In tracks like ‘Tinta 90’ and ‘Posta’, Tini reveals herself as a ‘secret depressive’ and victim of her own self-delusion, singing: ‘A princess doesn’t cry on television / But my acting was so believable / Even Tini believed it, for real / But Martina woke up, and she cares, for real.’
Tini knows her fans aren’t entitled to intimate insight into her health, but she believes she owes them honesty. Now, in spite of the naysayers – and there are plenty, she admits – Tini is looking to the future with the goal of ‘absolute freedom’.
‘I’m in a moment of realising who I am and where I stand, and trying to find a middle ground between the life I had and the life I want to build,’ she says. She’s six months into recording another album – one that, she says, reflects her search for freedom in its beats, lyrics and visuals. She’s also plotting a career-spanning tour that sounds like her own version of Taylor Swift’s Eras.
Later in 2025, she’ll star in the Disney+ drama Quebranto, her first TV series in 10 years. And regardless of what comes next, she’s already at peace from having shared her truth with the world. ‘Being able to transform feelings into music was part of my healing,’ she says, ‘and I believe that sharing it was also part of my healing.’ — LAUREN PUCKETT-POPE
Legacy Jazz: Samara Joy
Dress, HALSTON. Earrings and bracelet, VAN CLEEF & ARPELS. Heels, AQUAZZURA
Music runs in Samara Joy’s Blood. Her grandparents founded a gospel group in Philadelphia called The Savettes, and her father Antonio is a bassist and singer. But while it always made sense for her to become a professional musician, winning five Grammys within four years of graduating from college – including Best New Artist – is a level of extraordinary success that few could have predicted.
For many young fans, the 25-year-old Bronx native’s voice has been their introduction to jazz. Joy joined TikTok around the same time that she was recording her 2021 eponymous debut album. She’d been somewhat resistant to social media, but that quickly changed when she saw the reach it gave her. ‘I was scared that my content would look the same as everybody else’s – I thought, “I’m just singing to camera, everybody does this,”’ she says. ‘But once a bunch of strangers started gravitating toward it, I was like, “Oh, my gosh, this is crazy.” And I still feel this invisible but tangible embrace from the community.’
She quickly became a star of JazzTok, a community of jazz fans of different ages that has helped grow the genre among a younger audience. ‘My little pocket of the internet has found people who have never listened to jazz,’ she says. ‘I’m not sure how it happened, but I’m grateful it did.’ Her high-profile fans include LaKeith Stanfield, Chaka Khan and Anita Baker.
Last October, Joy released Portrait, her third album. Recorded over just three days, it gave her a new sense of power and creativity. ‘This album was different from my last two,’ she says, ‘because there was a period of time when I felt like I had to make a lot of decisions for myself, and I had to grow up and stand up for myself and my ideas.’
She will be on tour with Portrait throughout the summer, and late last year performed 13 shows with her family to promote her album A Joyful Holiday. She was joined by her 94-year-old grandfather, Elder Goldwire McLendon (who came out of retirement to sing), as well as her father and her uncle and cousins, all vocalists. ‘Audiences come out to see my family perform together. It’s a beautiful thing, because they get to share that memory with their own families,’ she says. ‘My grandfather is getting the chance to see this legacy play out – to see all of us still enjoying music from when he and my grandmother first introduced it to us in church, to now being able to do it all together once again after a lot of detours.’
She’s grateful to legends like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan for paving the way, and hopes to do the same in her own career. ‘I never wanted to feel like, “Oh, now that I’ve reached this height so fast, there’s nowhere else to go from here.” Because, in fact, there is.’ —ADRIENNE GAFFNEY
Dance Hits: Madison Beer
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Madison Beer is ready to make some bangers. The 26-year-old pop singer and social-media star spent the past few years setting records straight, releasing diaristic tracks to share what happened behind the scenes of her rocket-fuelled ascent to fame. Now, with the past exorcised and documented, she’s eager to have a little fun.
Beer was just a 13-year-old girl from Long Island, New York, when Justin Bieber tweeted her YouTube cover of Etta James’s ‘At Last’. Soon after, she was signed to Island Records and began working with Bieber’s then-manager, Scooter Braun. But the life-changing turn of events also thrust her into a harsh and unforgiving spotlight.
Beer’s overnight celebrity, and the attention that came from being connected to several high-profile male musicians, made her a target for cyberbullying. When she was 15, an intimate video she’d sent to a friend was posted online; instead of defending her right to privacy, internet trolls shamed her for making the video in the first place. At 16, she was dropped by her label and management. ‘I was always being tried as an adult,’ Beer says now. ‘I was trying to navigate how to be a person, and I’d have the whole internet to report to.’
She told her own side of the story in her 2023 memoir The Half of It, and in her second album Silence Between Songs, released the same year, detailing how her mental health plummeted, that she contemplated suicide, and how she recovered. ‘There were things I wanted to say that were important to me,’ she reflects. ‘I feel I really did achieve that.’ She embarked on a 63-stop world tour, selling out venues including Radio City Music Hall.
These days, having taken control of her narrative, the vocal powerhouse seems freer. Her pair of 2024 singles, ‘Make You Mine’ and ‘15 Minutes’, are club-ready earworms, the former earning her a Grammy nomination for Best Dance Pop Recording. Beer has been in the studio nearly every day working on her next album, one she says is still taking shape but is ‘feeling really good’. She’s been inspired, in part, by one of her favourite hobbies: video games. ‘I want my album to have a lot of really interesting noises that maybe you haven’t heard a lot in music.’
The new record could help Beer tick off the remaining boxes on her career bucket list (headlining a show at Madison Square Garden, winning a Grammy), but she says that her goals don’t keep her up at night. ‘I’m really proud of where I am,’ she explains. ‘If my younger self met me right now, she’d be like, “You’re the coolest girl on Earth. I get to be you one day? That’s so sick.”’ —MADISON FELLER
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