Sky Ferreira emerges after 10 years of ‘being erased’ by record label drama

The last time Sky Ferreira toured Australia in 2014, the cult musician, actor and model was just 21 and riding high on the critical success of her acclaimed debut Night Time, My Time, an album so perfectly realised it still ranks among the great testaments of Millennial pop.

Its anthems, including You’re Not the One and I Blame Myself, somehow merged the churning noise and depressive angst of Suicide, Jesus and Mary Chain and ’80s post-punk with expressive, radio-friendly vocal hooks to such an extent that it broke into Australia’s top 40, while Ferreira’s grungy aesthetic, louche demeanour and singular vision pointed to an icon in the making – a pop star for the Tumblr generation.

Sky Ferreira: The cult pop enigma returns to Australian stages for Vivid Live in Sydney and Rising in Melbourne.Credit: Patrik Sanberg

Which is why it’s confounding that, a decade on, we’re still awaiting its follow-up. “Yeah, it definitely did not play out the way I planned on it,” Ferreira says with a deadpan laugh over the phone from her home in Los Angeles.

She even recalls discussing Masochism – her now-mythical, long-promised, forever-delayed second album – with local reporters at the time, confident it was coming within the year.

“But I guess that’s life, right? It’s the big thing looming over me in my life,” she says of the album, and the staggered output that’s led to her reputation as a “modern pop enigma”. “Hopefully it’ll be worth it when it comes, or else whatever, I’ll just have to make another album after that. I’ll probably churn out seven of them.”

Ferreira – who is performing in Sydney at the Opera House on Sunday for Vivid Live and in Melbourne at the Forum on Tuesday for Rising – is in good spirits. But her tale is a pop tragedy, her career stalled amid boardroom quarrels, health issues, erratic stage behaviour, a 2013 drug bust and weighty expectations.

Foremost is her decade-long dispute with record label Capitol Records, who first signed the singer as a 16-year-old with plans of morphing her into the next Britney Spears, only to encounter an artist who craved creative agency.

In 2022, after years of delays to Masochism, Ferreira publicly accused the label of sabotaging her and blocking the release of new music and music videos.

Taking a leaf out of the #FreeBritney campaign that helped release Spears from years of stifling conservatorship, Ferreira’s fans last year initiated a #FreeSkyFerreira campaign, bombarding Capitol’s social media channels and even flying a banner over the record label’s headquarters in Los Angeles in September in an effort to force its hand.

Ferreira pictured in 2014.

The public shaming appeared to work. Last November, Variety reported that Ferreira had discretely vanished from the label’s public artist roster. If it pointed to a new dawn for the singer, the specifics are more complicated, says Ferreira. Is she officially free from her Capitol contract?

“Um, technically. In some sense. It wasn’t really sorted out the way it should have been, what a surprise,” she says with an audible eye roll. “It’s very ambiguous. I’ve gotta dance around a lot of things, figure it out and get things back that people shouldn’t own that I never gave them and that they never paid for, you know?

“Honestly, it’s a bit cruel,” she adds. “After trying to get out of there for so long, it feels very deliberate. Waiting 10 years to do that? They should have just dropped me 10 years ago if they weren’t planning on doing anything.”

Tracks she’d worked on across the years, including recordings that were to make up Masochism, are tied up in Capitol’s red tape, Ferreira says, limiting her potential to release new music. Her frustration is palpable.

“There’s stuff I did there that no one else had anything to do with. I didn’t have anyone A&R-ing my record, giving me direction, no one even set up a session for me. I was told that no one wanted to work with me for 10 years, which just wasn’t true.

“There’s a lot of things that have happened and at some point I would like to be able to say my side of it without it sounding hysterical or me having to pay some kind of price for it. But it’s kind of like, what else is there left to do to me? They already took 10 years of my career away from me – what else can they do?”

Even without new material, Ferreira’s legacy – musically, and as an outspoken template for young female musicians to make music in the label system on their own terms – is obvious in the current pop landscape.

Producer Dan Nigro, whose earliest work was on Ferreira’s Night Time, My Time, is now chart-topper Olivia Rodrigo’s main collaborator; listen to Billie Eilish’s left field new album Hit Me Hard and Soft and you’ll hear Ferreira’s woozy influence on highlight Birds of a Feather. During last month’s Coachella, a surprise cameo of Ferreira belting out a shoegaze-y cover of Lady A’s smooth standard Need You Now was one of the festival’s viral highlights.

It feels like proof that, even with a 10-year black hole, Ferreira could easily slot back into cultural ubiquity. Does she see a space for herself in today’s pop world that perhaps wasn’t available to her a decade ago, when expectations around young female pop artists were so much more restrictive, be it from record label executives or audiences?

“I do, and I feel there were a lot of female artists that were around that same time as me that were pushing the boundaries of what it meant to be mainstream, like Charli XCX or Lana Del Rey or Azalea Banks or Grimes,” says Ferreira.

“You couldn’t really figure out what box to put us in, and this was at a time where you literally could only be mainstream or you could only be ‘indie’.” She baulks when she says the word, a relatable tic to a generation.

“I’m not saying ‘we changed everything!’, but we had to deal with that and I do think we helped make the lines a little more blurred to where it wasn’t so black and white, you know?”

A lost decade is a lot to overcome for any artist, let alone one interrupted in their prime. Now that she’s finally on the other side of 10 years of turmoil, what are her feelings on it? Does it feel like lost time? Has she come to terms with it?

“I feel positive in some ways, and in other ways I do feel this weight and I feel very angry about the situation because I worked really hard to get to the point I was,” says Ferreira. Even if her discography’s unbearably slim, the lingering reverence for Night Time, My Time – physical copies of the album, long out of print, fetch collectible prices online – justifies Ferreira’s idealism around her work.

“I always knew this about my album, even when I put it out and when people were kind of not sure what to think of me or how to feel about it, I did feel like I did something I would always stand behind, no matter what age I was,” says Ferreira. “Now that it’s been 10 years and I see it’s still around and people still care about it without me consistently putting stuff out or having backing from a … I mean, my label wouldn’t even ...”

Years of indignation return as she speaks. “I still only have, like, the first round of vinyl that ever came out! It’s really upsetting to me because it felt like I was being erased, you know? Like, when you walk into a record store and you see everyone else’s things from that time and it’s as if I didn’t exist? It was really upsetting. So the fact I can go back to Australia with just one album and play the Sydney Opera House, it feels pretty surreal. I can’t believe it, honestly.”

Sky Ferreira will perform at the Sydney Opera House as part of Vivid Live on Sunday, at Forum Melbourne as part of Rising on Tuesday, and at Brisbane’s Princess Theatre as part of Open Season on Wednesday.

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