Laufey Put Her Holiday Series on Vinyl for the First Time
6 min read
Laufey performing at Lollapalooza in Chicago.
Laufey performing at Lollapalooza in Chicago.
Laufey brought her annual holiday series to vinyl for the first time, issuing three separate seven-inch editions rather than one record.
Each pairs a different holiday standard on the A-side with a different B-side, which turns a short extended play into a small collectable set.
Three Records Instead of One
Releasing three seven-inch singles rather than a single disc is a deliberate structure and it changes what the release is.
A buyer who wants all the material has to acquire three objects, each with different artwork and a different pairing.
That is a familiar strategy in vinyl and it is frequently criticised, because it asks the audience to pay three times for what could have been one record.
The counter-argument for a holiday release is that the format matches the occasion. Seven-inch singles are gift-sized objects in a way an album is not.
A Series Rather Than an Album
What distinguishes this from a conventional Christmas album is that it has been built incrementally across several years.
Songs were added in 2024 and again in 2025, so the catalogue has grown rather than arriving complete.
That model suits a holiday project better than a single album does, because the audience returns to the same material annually and new additions can be absorbed into an existing habit.
Seven Songs, Nineteen Minutes
The 2025 release runs seven tracks across roughly nineteen minutes, which averages under three minutes per song.
Holiday standards are mostly short by design, having been written when the single was the dominant format and the running time was fixed by the physical medium.
Keeping to that length is a period-appropriate choice rather than a limitation, and it avoids the common failure of holiday albums that stretch two-minute songs to five.
One Original Among the Standards
The series includes Christmas Magic, her own composition, which first appeared in 2024 and was featured in a film released that year.
Writing an original Christmas song is one of the hardest things in popular music, because the audience is comparing it to a canon assembled over eighty years.
The successful ones almost always sound like they might already exist, which is a strange target: familiarity without plagiarism.
Why Christmas Standards Suit Her Voice
Laufey’s music sits in a jazz-adjacent idiom built on standards-era harmony, close-mic vocals and small-ensemble arrangement.
The holiday canon was largely written in and for exactly that vocabulary, mostly between the nineteen-thirties and the nineteen-fifties.
The material therefore requires almost no adaptation. Where most artists have to translate Christmas standards into their own idiom, hers is already the one the songs came from.
A Collaboration on the B-Side
One of the three editions pairs its A-side with a collaboration on the reverse, which is the traditional use of a B-side.
B-sides were historically where artists put material that did not fit the main release: collaborations, alternate versions and experiments.
Streaming eliminated the distinction, since every track is equally available. Reviving it on a physical release restores a structure that no longer exists digitally.
The Economics of a Christmas Catalogue
Holiday music has an economic profile unlike anything else in recorded music, and building a catalogue in it is a long-term investment.
A Christmas song that finds an audience earns every year in perpetuity, arriving in November and disappearing in January, indefinitely.
The best-known examples generate substantial annual income decades after release, which is a return no ordinary single produces.
Why Artists Start Early
Building a holiday catalogue early in a career is unusual, because the format is traditionally associated with established artists.
The conventional sequence is that a Christmas album arrives once the main catalogue is established, often as a contractual filler or a late-career comfort release.
Doing it annually from a young age instead treats holiday music as a genuine part of the work rather than as a side project, which is closer to how the mid-century artists who wrote these songs approached it.
Vinyl as a Gift Format
Vinyl’s commercial revival is substantially driven by gift purchasing, which peaks sharply in the fourth quarter.
A seven-inch holiday single is close to an ideal product for that market: inexpensive, seasonal, visually distinctive and physically small.
Issuing three of them at once maximises the shelf presence, which matters in a retail environment where display space is the scarce resource.
The Icelandic Connection
Laufey is Icelandic and Chinese, and the Icelandic musical background is relevant to how she works.
Iceland has an unusually strong music education system and a small enough scene that classical, jazz and pop training overlap rather than separating into tracks.
Musicians who come through it tend to be technically formal in a way that is uncommon in popular music, which is audible in the harmonic writing.
Holiday Music as a Career Strategy
An annual holiday release also solves a scheduling problem that affects every recording artist.
Album cycles run eighteen months to two years, which leaves long stretches with nothing to release and no reason for the audience to return.
A short seasonal release each year fills that gap without competing with the main catalogue, and it arrives at the point in the calendar when attention is easiest to get.
What the Standards Repertoire Requires
Recording songs that have been recorded thousands of times sets a specific bar, because the audience knows the definitive versions.
The unsuccessful approach is reverence, which produces a version indistinguishable from the reference recording and therefore pointless.
The successful approach is usually a change of scale rather than of interpretation, taking a big-band arrangement down to a small ensemble or the reverse.
Why the Christmas Canon Stopped Growing
The overwhelming majority of songs in heavy December rotation were written between roughly 1934 and 1963, and the list has barely changed since.
A handful of later additions broke through, mostly from the seventies and eighties, and exactly one from the nineties achieved genuine standard status. Nothing written this century has joined them at scale.
The reason is not that songwriters stopped trying. Every year produces dozens of new Christmas singles from major artists, and almost all of them vanish by mid-January and never return.
What blocks them is the nature of holiday listening itself. The audience is not seeking novelty; it is seeking the specific songs it associates with childhood and family, which means a new song has to become a memory before it can become a fixture. That takes a generation, not a season.
How Seasonal Streaming Actually Behaves
Holiday music produces the most extreme listening curve of any genre, and the shape is remarkably consistent year to year.
Streams begin climbing in the first week of November, accelerate sharply after American Thanksgiving, peak in the four days around Christmas itself, and collapse to almost nothing by the first week of January.
That concentration has a practical consequence for release timing. A holiday record issued in October has six weeks of runway before the audience arrives; one issued in December has already missed most of the window.
It also explains why the physical formats matter more here than elsewhere. A vinyl single bought as a gift in November is consumed inside the same narrow season, and the purchase decision is made weeks before anybody listens.
What Is Actually Being Tested
Two things. Whether an original Christmas song can enter the canon at all, which almost none written in the last thirty years has managed.
And whether a series built annually can accumulate into something that feels like a body of work rather than a set of seasonal singles.
Seven songs, three seven-inch records, one original among the standards, and a catalogue being built one December at a time.
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