Italian
There are so many folkloric tales around the songwriter and recording artist Sky Ferreira, it can be hard to know where to begin.
Maybe it’s how she moved to New York from Los Angeles at 15 to model, sing and act in homage to her idol Madonna.
It could be all the fame she gained as a teenager for self-releasing tracks on MySpace, a pioneering example of the viral pop star.
Perhaps it’s how she spent childhood holidays with Michael Jackson because her grandmother was his hairdresser.
Or it might be the music battles. Ferreira’s sophomore album — Masochism, fittingly — has been delayed for nine years with no release date in sight. An epic war has played out with Capitol Records — a conflict so intense and stifling someone (it’s still not clear who) paid to fly a plane with the message “Free Sky Ferreira” over the Capitol Tower last year. (She says she wasn’t even in L.A. to see it.)
That last part is now changing — maybe.
On Thursday, Ferreira, 32, will release a new song, part of the soundtrack of the upcoming film Babygirl. To much of the pop firmament, this might seem like a ho-hum event, one more online drop indistinguishable from all the others. But to Ferreira junkies — and a glance at some corners of Reddit, YouTube and TikTok suggests there are many — this is a landmark event.
Ferreira has dribbled out a few songs in the 11 years since her jaw-dropping (and drama-filled) debut album Night Time, My Time. But she has always released those songs with the imprint — really, under the yoke — of Capitol Records, with which she has had one of music’s wildest feuds. This time, she’s doing it on her own, commissioned by A24, director Halina Reijn and music supervisor Meghan Currier to come up with a tune for the Nicole Kidman film that captures both the movie’s theme of sexual liberation and her own state of mind about the prisons that keep female creativity down. It will surprise no one that the song is titled “Leash.”
From the first seconds, awash in feedback and a Smiths-like riff, the song is pure Sky, snarl and vulnerability each jockeying for their place. The lyrics foreground sexual politics as they carry into a latter-day Madonna chorus. But it’s easy to feel the undercurrent of the professional kind as well. “I bit my tongue/And bled the truth/As I live and breathe/I’m dead to you,” she sings.
Ferreira’s previous song, 2022’s “Don’t Forget,” carried a coded poison-pen message for Capitol and its Universal Music Group parent. (“There’s a fire on your street/Terrorized the whole community/Little troubled girl, you see/Burnin’ down your house of certainty.”) And she paid to produce it out of her own pocket. But it was still on that label.
“Leash,” in contrast, is completely hers both in message and legal title; Capitol finally released her from her contract in November 2023. And the four minutes that play over Babygirl‘s end-credits never let you forget its author.
“It’s a very dark and dysfunctional relationship,” Ferreira says of the on-screen dynamic. “And I kind of wanted to embody that in the song.” She says the track — which she wrote, performed, produced and mixed herself — is a “little bit of both” when it comes to channeling both her and the Kidman character’s desire for liberation. (You can listen to the song here.)
“Leash” is also contending for an Oscar. A nomination from the entertainment business’ most establishment entity after years of scorching the earth of one of its biggest corporations would be an ironic ending to say the least.
In a conversation that lasted over two hours one evening at The Dresden last week — she lives nearby — the musician was a mix of resentful, relieved and, for her all her chattiness, still opaque. Sky Ferreira is finally free to discuss what’s been happening to her for the past decade behind the corporate veil. But more talk doesn’t mean less mystery.
Sitting in the restaurant, her protean hair back to blond, in a trademark short black skirt and with subtle gaps in her teeth, Ferreira can seem not just rare but an anachronism — a living, breathing Goth enigma in an age when they exist only in mid-budget biopics.
Ferreira emerged on the alt-pop scene in the early 2010s with a host of songs like “99 Tears,” “Everything Is Embarrassing” and, most famously, “You’re Not The One,” a riff on unrequited love told with a driving beat and hued poetry; the song became a club anthem (well, in grittier clubs) and Ferreira even performed it on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. A few years earlier, barely 20, she was signed to Capitol after previously committing to Parlophone. Label executives were excited about a star who had an online following, an instantly iconic vocal signature, an appealingly brooding persona and, in her songwriting, an unusually keen sense of pop’s jumbled history.
The Night Time sessions would become legion. She would put out the album after several years of fighting with Capitol only when she agreed to pay for much of it herself. The resultant record showed a striking evolution from the synth-pop stylings of Madonna and Lisa Lisa on those early MySpace recordings to the distortion-heavy melodia of proto bands like Suicide and The Jesus and Mary Chain, with arrangements that dance playfully, goadingly, between then and now.
The fuzzy riffs that open “Leash” are almost canonically in this latter style, as if someone was responding to a dare on how to make a song at once drivingly industrial and soulfully tuneful. The effect is to keep two polar emotions in balance in the listener — a teen rage about the messiness of the world with a tender view of its pain and beauty.
Though she came up with Charli XCX and a host of young millennial stars in a cusp-of-streaming 2010s world, Ferreira has largely in the past few years exempted herself from that group. Over the course of the Dresden conversation she seemed both aware of, and only slightly bitter about, the effects of her retreat from major concerts and releases. “People see me at a party, and it’s like they’ve seen a ghost,” she says, before adding a laugh that mixes nervousness and pride. If Ferreira’s life has grown smaller, she seems mainly fine with that, hanging with a tight circle of friends that includes her self-chosen publicist and aide de camp, an indie music marketing veteran named Jen Appel — another small gesture of freedom from Capitol, who she says didn’t want her working with the publicist.
Of course such a remove has, among certain online-fan circles, only enhanced Ferreira’s fame. To spend time in the Skyverse is to plunge into an intense back and forth over whether she is a victim of her own perfectionism (a popular theory) writer’s block (ditto), anxiety (up there), drugs (a perennial) — or of a meat-grinding system that wouldn’t let Sky be Sky.
At The Dresden she argues passionately for the latter, returning again and again to her main theme, which is that after a host of creative disagreements in the early 2010s Capitol went full-on vendetta — blocking her from doing press, paying no money for studio time or videos, telling radio programmers not to play her music, blackballing her with collaborators and sitting on tracks simply to punish her — for years.
“It was spiteful and it was personal,” she says, one of many such comments. “There was no reason to do any of it except to hurt me.”
Each tale is more eye-popping than the next — or would be, if one didn’t know the modern music business. At one point, she says, executives told her they couldn’t release her from her contract until she gave them seven albums; what’s worse, she says she had essentially provided that much music but Capitol refused to release any of it just to keep her locked in her contract. “Trapped, that’s how they wanted me,” she says. She instead mostly made a living by modeling (Hilfiger, Adidas) and acting (Baby Driver, Twin Peaks: The Return).
She says the earliest Capitol skirmishes were about her wanting to take the time to get the music right “and they were acting like this was some kind of Supermarket Sweep“. As for the “D” word: “What does difficult even mean? Like, ‘sorry I’m not a mindless idiot?’”
Even the timing of the contract-dissolve she says was deliberate — 10 years almost to the day of the release of Night Time, which Ferreira believes was a form of we-own-you psychic torture. “I think it was a way to fuck me,” she says, because she always told them she wanted to put out Masochism before that anniversary. She says the label communicated the drop with what appeared to be an automated email.
Who the specific alleged Capitol violators are she doesn’t say, and given the amount of executive turnover at the company in recent years, such a list might be long and out of date anyway. A Capitol spokesperson declined to comment for this story.
And while an onlooker will understandably ask why Ferreira didn’t hire more lawyers to fight the UMG machine, the full picture can be stark and heartrending no matter its subject’s stubbornness: a gifted person who can’t share her music with the world because to do so would embarrass a big corporation she can’t possibly take on.
“To me it all came back to the same thing it always does [in the entertainment business],” she says. “People like you until they realize that you’re a human being with opinions and they’re not going to be able to control you.” She pauses. “Until they realize ‘Hey, I’m not going to make as much money off this person as I thought.” One of Capitol’s major stars at the time of Ferreira’s fiercest battles with the label was Katy Perry, another big-voiced Southern Californian with anthemic tendencies, and at least some at the label seemed to see the same path for Ferreira. Interestingly, Perry herself was being squelched by Columbia until the late executive Angelica Cob-Baehler brought her over to Capitol.
Ferreira says if she found the music business insincere then, the phoniness has only grown since. “So many artists out there now are screaming about how authentic they are. And it’s like ‘If you’re that authentic why do you have to tell everyone about it?’ People now on major labels are presented as if they’re not signed. And I’m like, ‘Where do you think this money to make an album comes from?’”
If Ferreira is starting to sound a little like Holden Caulfield, that’s by design. Or, at least, by effort. Something about her can seem cultivated, a mythic figure in a post-mythic world. It helps that she doesn’t seem to be immersed in the internet; she appeared unaware, for instance, of basic memes around the 2024 election. But she spins stories of her early wanderings with self-dramatizing flair.
There was the time as a teenager in New York she snuck into the legendary Don Hill’s and met Iggy Pop … only for him to spend most of the time talking about his convertible in Miami. There was the time she played tennis in an Adidas ad with Stan Smith not realizing he was a tennis player and not a shoe designer. (“He beat me pretty good.”) Or her early meeting at the house of Rick Rubin in which she wanted him to produce her music and maybe bring along his famous neighbor to do some stuff on it too. (“Working with Bob Dylan would have been cool.”)
And did she really get called to read for the role of Joan Baez in the new Dylan film A Complete Unknown? Ferreira tells these outsize stories with a kind of mumbly everyday casualness that make them seem credible, a modern-day Zelig popping up in all these physical places when everyone else has disappeared into the internet ether.
Most often, though, Ferreira can seem stuck on the last decade of the Capitol fight, so much so that even gentle reminders that Leash represents the chance for a new start don’t stick for very long. She returns often to their alleged violations. (“You can say ‘bygones be bygones’ or whatever, but I was shackled to this for half of my life.”) To skeptics, such persistence will reinforce the theory that Ferreira is her own worst enemy.
But it’s also plausible that an inability to mentally move on only confirms the seriousness of her victimization. No honest young female artist will tout the music business as a uniformly supportive and artist-positive environment. But Ferreira’s experience seems singularly bad, with perhaps some of her self-confessed anxieties making her even less equipped to handle it.
“I did competitive figure skating when I was little. I put pressure on myself,” she says. “But that was OK. It was the pressure from the outside I can’t handle. When someone is yelling at me I can’t deal. I shut down really easily.”
A reluctance to play the gladhanding game also likely didn’t help. “They tried to media-train me when I was 15 and the teacher quit. He literally walked out.” She gives one of her knowing, semi-nervous laughs. “He said we couldn’t talk about religion, couldn’t talk about anything. It was in the basement of Capitol — how’s that for symbolism — and he walked out. Literally after an hour.” (In an email, Currier, the Babygirl music supervisor, called Ferreira “fearless.”)
Ferreira would also hardly be the first young star to clash with Capitol. Halsey split with the company last year after a protracted battle in which the artist said the label was sitting on their music. “Basically I have a song that I love that I wanna release ASAP,” they wrote on social in May 2022. “But my record label won’t let me.” Executives were waiting, Halsey said, to “fake a viral moment on TikTok.”
Ferreira is frustratingly evasive — perhaps because she is not clear herself — whether any of the songs she recorded for Masochism can be used on a future record (she owns the publishing rights but would probably need to re-record them herself “and that takes the kind of money only labels have”). Unless she’s playing possum, there at the moment seems no grand plan to cut any full album, just perhaps to keep at the same occasional song-every-few-years pace she’s been on.
And she says she has no desire to do a Taylor’s Version of the Night Time tracks — after all, she already paid to have them produced exactly as she wanted. Anyone who has thrashed to the breathy hypnotics of “Omanko,” sunk into the anthemic ethereality of “Boys” or semi-bopped to the walking-down-the-boulevard self-flagellations of “I Blame Myself” (Shirley Manson would be proud) will agree a re-recording would be one of modern music’s great acts of redundancy. Night Time may be alternative music’s most perfect 21st-century record.
Ferreira says she has no illusions about the depth of her plight, but that doesn’t make her grievance any less legitimate.
“I wasn’t trying to change the world. But I was trying to make something real,” she says. “I believed in something, and they wouldn’t let me just go and do that. I just wanted to make the music that I knew would connect with a lot of people.” Was it luck, laziness or exploitation that hasn’t allowed for more of it? Like so many things Sky, it’s a delicious question, and one just out of reach.
