Is She Jazz? Is She Pop? She’s Laufey, and She’s a Phenomenon.

For Laufey, 2024 was a whirlwind year. 2025 may be even wilder.

Last year, the indie singer-songwriter, who cannot be described without a flurry of hyphenated hybrids — Icelandic-Chinese, jazz-pop-classical, TikTok-trad — became a breakout star with a quirky pop style that draws equally from Taylor Swift and the romantic whimsy of midcentury musicals. She won a Grammy Award and attended the Met Gala in a rosé-colored princess gown and, in perhaps the ultimate orchestra-nerd Easter egg, a veil embroidered with a Bach fugue.

In an interview this spring, as she prepared to release her third studio album, “A Matter of Time,” Laufey, 26, was still practically glowing over those accomplishments. But seated at a control console at Electric Lady Studios in New York, where she recorded three of the album’s 14 songs, she also cataloged the jitters and anxieties she felt being thrust into the machinery of fame.

“I wanted 2025 to be this year where I was less anxious,” she said, “and instead of walking meekly onto the red carpets or meekly into relationships, I wanted to walk with confidence.”

“And I wanted to write a country song,” Laufey continued. She paused a beat. “Country-ish,” she amended herself, and then pushed a button to play “Clean Air” — a twangy starting-over ballad that she said was partly inspired by Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris’s “Trio” albums from the 1980s and ’90s.

In just a few years, Laufey — her name is properly pronounced with a vowel unfamiliar to most English speakers, but she answers to LAY-vay — has become a phenomenon almost without comparison in contemporary pop. Even in an age of scrambled genres, she stands out as a master code-switcher who cites inspiration from Prokofiev and Chet Baker yet has racked up more than five billion streams with concise, witty earworms that paint a glamorous wonderland shaded with the second guessings of a Gen Z diarist. Despite ruffling some feathers among the conservative gatekeepers of jazz, she has cultivated a vast fan base online and this fall will embark on her first arena tour, including two nights at Madison Square Garden.

And she has big fans.