The Return of Sky Ferreira

Silenced for a decade, Ferreira's awaited return to music places her in the pantheon of thwarted women artists.

Sky Ferreira by Mario Testino for V Magazine

I recently attended an early screening of the new A24 erotic thriller Babygirl, directed by Halina Reijn. It was emblematic of Reijn’s supernova of a film—smart, subversive, and cool—that the final shot ends with the sudden burst of heavy guitars and the screech of synths before the smoky, unmistakable vocals of Sky Ferreira appear from the haze, strained and angry and urgent. The song, ‘Leash’, marks Ferreira’s first release in two years, and her first release as a newly independent recording artist. For a certain kind of person, a new Sky Ferreira song is a thing worth noting, even celebrating. Ferreira’s output since the release of her seminal debut, Night Time, My Time, more than a decade ago, has been sporadic, a litany of stop-starts, promised release dates that came and went, and alleged tours that never quite took off—a long, protracted, rarely punctuated silence. In the press, Ferreira has been cast as a reluctant pop star, an enigmatic perfectionist, even a recluse. The real narrative is less glamorous, more banal, and more worthy of attention: an artist thwarted by a foreboding, unmovable corporate machine. A so-called renaissance, marked by all the usual markers—the A24 connection, an interview in Vogue, rumblings of an imminent album release—is teetering on the horizon. On Twitter, Ferreira’s music has been circulating again. A recent post re-sharing the music video for her 2012 hit, ‘Everything is Embarrassing’, with the caption “It’s time to admit this is one of the best songs ever” was viewed half a million times.

Re-listening to Night Time, My Time is like stepping into a time machine. It’s an experience that transcends bog-standard nostalgia and feels a little like recapturing some lost version of yourself. The record was released on October 29th, 2013. A week earlier, Kanye West had proposed to Kim Kardashian at a stadium in San Francisco. A month earlier, Breaking Bad had ended, Walter White dead on the floor, Badfinger in the background. This was the year Miley Cyrus twerked at the VMAs, the year Jennifer Lawrence fell at the Oscars, the year of Beyoncé by Beyoncé, of the Harlem Shake and House of Cards and the Red Wedding. It was the year I turned 20. I was living in Sydney’s Inner West, half-heartedly attending university, and working part time at an old movie theatre on King Street. I spent my weekends partying harder than I have partied before or since, those being the halcyon days where you could take ecstasy and ride the velvet cloud of euphoria without suffering the days-long, soul-crippling comedown. I was in love with someone different every day, each crush an interchangeable avatar in a vast, vague narrative of all-encompassing romance that occupied most of my waking hours. I spent my measly cinema earnings on cigarettes, jugs of cheap beer, and, when budget allowed, spandex outfits from American Apparel. On Thursday nights my friends and I went to World Bar in King’s Cross for Propaganda, an indie-club night imported from Bristol, where we danced to Joy Division and The Strokes until we got kicked out at 6AM, when the sun was beginning to rise. The greatest sign of social cachet then was being photographed by the club photographer, who uploaded the pictures to a Facebook album the following afternoon. Images of ourselves felt completely, gloriously out of our control - a thing that happened to us, not something we proactively created.

Sky Ferreira was our girl, and long before we knew her as a musician, we knew her as an image—the Jane Birkin of the Tumblr era, a stand-in for all our aesthetic aspirations: the peroxide shag of hair, the pouting cherry-lacquered lips, that doe-eyed, kohl-lined stare, and the leather jackets, the denim cut-offs, the Raybans, the towering patent leather stilettos. Dana Boulos, the fashion photographer and filmmaker, was at the heart of this cultural moment and created some of the era’s most memorable imagery. She and Ferreira first met in 2007 at the legendary Dim Mak party nights, hosted by Steve Aoki at the Cinespace in Hollywood. “We quickly became friends since we were always the youngest at all the events during the indie sleaze era,” Boulos told me. “I’d often run into Sky at Cory [Kennedy]’s yard sales.” Boulos, who was building a name for herself as a photographer during the embryonic days of Tumblr while working as a casting agent at American Apparel, started using Ferreira in her shoots. “I saw Sky as such a muse. Her energy was magnetic at such a young age. I wanted to cast her in every project I could.” The images Boulos and Ferreira captured at that time—soft, delicate and dream-like, with a brooding darkness, lurking just beneath the manicured surface—helped shape the taste of a whole generation of young women. Boulos’ work—influenced by Sofia Coppola, Tracey Emin, and Cookie Mueller—gave us, boys and girls who felt a million miles away in Sydney, a blueprint for a different kind of creative living. “I wanted to create images that would last forever, something timeless and classic,” says Boulos. “We were deeply inspired by girlhood, capturing that energy and sharing it through the images we created. There was such a sense of freedom then.”

Sky Ferreira by Dana Boulos

With Night Time, My Time, Ferreira seemed to bottle that sense of freedom, distilling it with a witch-like proficiency into sound. The album landed with a triumphant thud. Pitchfork gave it a glowing 8.1 and heralded it “one of the most cohesive pieces of pop-rock” of the year, and everyone from The Guardian to Rolling Stone listed it as one of the years’ best albums. Having enlisted the big gun producing trio of Ariel Rechtshaid (whose Midas touch would later brush Haim, Solange, Charli XCX, and Kelela), Justin Raisen (Kim Gordon, Lil Yachty), and Dan Nigro (Chappell Roan, Caroline Polachek, Olivia Rodrigo), Ferreira created a record that blended the best elements of 80s synth and 90s grunge, punctuated by searching, introspective lyrics that elevated the standard fare of life as a 20-something, the romantic pining, the self-doubt and self-loathing. The album revealed both a sonic and aesthetic sophistication that transcended much of the saccharine, cutesy pop that was being produced at the time. A successful pop star understands the language of aesthetics as acutely as they understand sound, and Ferreira, buoyed by her work as a model, mastered the art of album visuals. Night Time, My Time’s cover was a controversial shot of a naked, water-soaked Ferreira in the shower of a Parisian hotel, smudged lipstick, a vacant downcast stare, lensed by French cinema’s enfant terribles Gaspar Noé. Her music videos, most directed by Grant Singer, looked more like the Hedi Slimane-lensed fashion campaigns than they did traditional music videos, all artful Los Angeles dreamscapes and high fashion gloss, peppered with David Lynch references. While Miley Cyrus was working with Terry Richardson to use the style of counter-culture to try and slough off layers of Disney sheen, Ferreira achieved Cyrus' desired sense of cool with unaffected ease.