Laufey has been announced as the next headline act in Fortnite Festival, the game’s musical spin-off, and players can now hear a batch of her tracks inside the rhythm mode, unlock emotes and cosmetics inspired by her A Matter Of Time arena tour, and even play as her in battle royale.
The collaboration lands this week after a run that already included a Laufey emote added a couple of months ago, a response she described as crazy, and after her first Coachella Festival performance last weekend. This is the latest turn for a crossover that puts the Icelandic singer at the center of one of gaming’s biggest music stages, following previous headline acts including Chappell Roan, Lady Gaga, Billie Eilish and The Weeknd.
Laufey said the partnership is the kind of move people might not expect from her. She said she was known as a jazz girl when she started out and that people assumed she was timid and soft, but added that running around with a gun in Fortnite is “absolutely the best way to show that there are many more layers to me.” The singer said she woke up to fans tagging her in clips of themselves winning matches while playing as her, and called the experience “very special.”
The game now goes beyond a simple avatar skin. Alongside the tracks and cosmetics, Fortnite has added a karaoke mode, pushing the collaboration further into the music space that has become central to the title’s appeal. Laufey said she did not grow up playing video games, but recently got a PS5 through her boyfriend and has been playing a lot, including FIFA because he is British. She said she loves Fortnite because music is such a big part of it, and said she only later realized how closely the game is tied to music.
What made the deal work, she said, was keeping it grounded in her own world. Laufey said she wanted the collaboration to feel authentic and worked closely with her twin sister and creative director Junia, who was involved in every aspect of the project and even helped her with the dances that are mimicked in the game. “It’s very important that every part of what I do is a reflection of my world and my storytelling,” she said, adding that Fortnite is “just so fantastical.”
That sense of spectacle also runs through her live schedule. Laufey said playing Coachella is “such a great honour” because it fits her goal of bringing music steeped in older styles to something that feels current, and she said it can be scary to bring a string quartet onto a stage that has just hosted a K-pop act. She said she hoped that performance would turn more people toward classical or jazz music, and the same logic appears to be guiding the game partnership: pop culture on the surface, but a deliberate push to widen her audience without blunting what makes her distinct.
The result is a crossover that fits both sides. Fortnite Festival gets a star whose music can be turned into an interactive event, and Laufey gets a platform that extends her retro dance moment with Alysa Liu and the rest of her current A Matter Of Time era into a global game audience. The question now is not whether the pairing is unusual. It is whether this is the point where more of the people who know her from gaming start following her into jazz and classical music, exactly as she said she hoped.
