Italian
When Sky Ferreira was first approached to write a song for “Babygirl,” A24’s new erotic thriller starring Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson, she was taken by surprise.
“I was like, ‘Is this actually happening? When’s the other shoe going to drop?’” Ferreira tells Variety over Zoom with a nervous chuckle. “Just because for this kind of film, they could probably get anyone right now. I actually never get asked to do this sort of thing.”
“Babygirl” follows Romy (Kidman), a high-powered CEO who pursues a forbidden romance with a younger intern (Dickinson) and explores the darkest parts of herself in the process. The film premiered at Venice Film Festival in August to rave reviews, with Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman writing that its “ambition isn’t just to feed the thriller engine. It’s to capture something genuine about women’s erotic experience in the age of control.”
Director Halina Reijn personally reached out to Ferreira while she was on tour in Australia and sent the singer-songwriter an early cut of the film. “For me, it was actually an ideal way of writing because that’s kind of how I write anyways. I visually see it — not like in colors, but I almost see it as a music video or something,” she says.
Popular on Variety Ferreira ended up watching the film three times before its screening link expired. After her first viewing, she started an idea that was “more of a direct pop song,” but “it just wasn’t sitting well with me.” When she watched it again, Ferreira began to feel frustration toward the characters — and something clicked.
“It’s not like this is a love affair,” she says of the dynamic between Kidman and Dickinson’s characters. “There’s a lot of chaos in there hidden underneath, and I felt like that was more appropriate than trying to make it about some kind of awakening within [Romy]. I just wanted to capture the destruction that she’s causing to herself and to everyone around her, you know?”
Ferreira kept coming back to a particular scene involving Dickinson and a dog, even screenshotting an image from the film and pulling it up while she was writing. The resulting song is “Leash” (out Thursday via A24 Music), a dark, grunge-y banger backed by a steady stream of ’80s synths that soundtracks the film’s credits. To create its layered sound, Ferreira took inspiration from psych-rock band the Brian Jonestown Massacre and used her own vocal chops as an instrument in addition to the voice of one of the characters. “I can’t tell you who,” she teases.
Though Ferreira insists she doesn’t know exactly why Reijn asked her specifically, she postulates that the title of her long-awaited second album — “Masochism” — may have had something to do with it. “There’s some references, but I wasn’t being literal,” Ferreira says of the record’s subject matter. “It’s not about chains and leather and whatever, it’s not that kind of thing. I mean, there is a thing related to chains, but it was more emotional chains.”
“Masochism,” the follow-up to her 2013 debut album “Night Time, My Time” — which has since become an indie classic — has been stalled for years after several public disputes with label Capitol Records. Last year, it appeared that Ferreira and Capitol had finally parted ways when the artist was no longer listed on the label’s website roster. Ferreira confirms this, saying of her “Babygirl” song: “I feel like I wouldn’t have been able to do this if I was [still with my label], to be honest. It felt like one step closer to freedom within myself and my career again.”
News of Ferreira’s departure from Capitol came as fans began rallying around her, mounting a public campaign to release her from her contract. They even purchased a digital billboard in Times Square that read “Free Sky Ferreira.” “I think that’s really the only way I was able to somewhat get out because it put a lot of pressure on them to at least drop me, even though they did it in the most fucked up way,” Ferreira says.
She claims that the label “wouldn’t let me leave” until the 10-year anniversary of “Night Time, My Time” in October 2023, and dropped her “literally to the day” in “an email on a weekend.” (A representative for Capitol Records declined to comment.)
“It felt weirdly personal, you know? Like a conspiracy, but it was real,” she says, adding that it felt like she was “slowly being erased” before being dropped. “There’s so many things about it that are just so wrong on so many levels.”
Despite being free from a label, Ferreira was lost when it came to what she wanted her first independent release to be. Luckily, “Babygirl” came along. “I wanted to release music anyways around this time so it kind of worked out perfectly. But I was like, how do I even go about it?” she says. “Because I haven’t released music on my own in, like, 15 years or something. And now that I’m not on my label … it takes the pressure off of like, what is the first thing I am going to say? And I actually have a lot to say in this one.”
Ferreira says working on “Babygirl” also forced her to slowly put herself back in the public sphere again, doing interviews and figuring out how to approach her career in an industry that has changed drastically since the early 2010s. “I mean, I’m not going to be the person who is like on TikTok making videos or anything,” she laughs.
And she wants to keep things independent — at least for now — with plans for another release soon after “Leash” so she’s “not just running into the arms of someone else, label-wise.”
“In a perfect world, I could just do some distribution kind of thing instead of going to a label, but it’s easier said than done financially,” she adds.
Though a timeline for the release of “Masochism” is still unclear, Ferreira teases that “Leash” could potentially make the final cut. “I think it fits in,” she says. Until then, fans may see her on their TV screens come March, as “Leash” has been generating Oscars buzz for best original song. Ferreira confirms that it’s been submitted for the race, though she maintains that she doesn’t “know how any of that works.”
“I don’t even have a manager so, somebody told me that!” she laughs. “It didn’t sink in until like two days later and I was like, ‘Wait, what?’”
“Babygirl” is in theaters Dec. 25 from A24.
