Despite releasing just one album more than a decade ago, Sky Ferreira has achieved something increasingly rare: remaining culturally ever-present while being largely absent. Few artists of her generation have inspired quite so much conversation, speculation and mythology. So who is pop’s greatest enigma, really?
The stories you’ve heard about California-born Sky Ferreira are probably less interesting than the woman on the other end of the phone.
Throughout our conversation, her dog Lula barks in the background and, every single time, 33-year-old Sky apologises for it with a laugh. She speaks in long, meandering trains of thought, treating each question with sincerity. For someone who has spent more than a decade as one of the music industry’s most analysed pop disruptors, she’s remarkably unguarded. Perhaps that’s because so much of the fascination surrounding her has little to do with who she actually is.
With only one album to her name, 2013’s Night Time, My Time, she has remained an unlikely constant in pop culture. Her influence has stretched far beyond her catalogue, living in the artists she inspired, the fans who have stayed loyal and the endless conversations attempting to explain her absence. But Sky herself is much simpler than the mythology suggests: funny, reflective and fiercely determined, someone who has spent years protecting her relationship with music above everything else.
The story begins, as many modern pop origin stories do, online.
In 2008, a teenage Sky was uploading homemade recordings to MySpace and searching for anyone willing to listen, when her songwriting caught the attention of Bloodshy & Avant, the Swedish production duo behind Britney Spears’ “Toxic”. Through them, she signed to Capitol Records at just 15-years-old, stepping into a major-label system already trying to imagine what its next pop star might look like. It was the kind of opportunity many young musicians dream about. But over time, Sky found herself at odds with the version of herself that others wanted to build.
“Labels want to make money, and they want to do it as fast as possible and as easily as possible,” she says. “I think that’s really what it is. It’s unfortunate and it’s driven by ego and greed and it’s just misogynistic.”
Rather than dutifully following the glossy 2000s-pop blueprint in front of her, Sky rewrote what was expected and gravitated towards a sound that was darker, stranger and much more DIY. That creative stubbornness crystallised in 2012’s “Everything Is Embarrassing”, the breakthrough single that earned widespread critical acclaim and eventually landed on Pitchfork’s list of the 20 best songs of the 2010s. “I was sort of constantly being told, ‘Your career’s over,'” she recalls of the Dev Hynes-produced track, which she uploaded to SoundCloud against her label’s wishes when she was just 20.
The irony was that the song’s power came from everything that made it difficult to categorise. Its glistening synths owed as much to melancholic new wave as contemporary dance music, while its restless, chugging pulse refused the easy release of a conventional chorus. There was no big drop, no power-note climax, no obvious bid for radio supremacy. Instead, Sky delivered one of the decade’s great pop performances, sonically hooded in disguise. A detached yet devastating, coolly observational song which seemed to hover in a state of romantic disillusionment, turning unbridled honesty into its central hook. At a moment when pop was obsessed with being bigger, louder and shinier, “Everything Is Embarrassing” was content to be emotionally messy and undone.
By the time Night Time, My Time arrived in 2013, Sky had already become a bona fide cult figure. Teenagers adored her, musicians took note and fashion embraced her. The bleached hair, the smudged eyeliner, the cigarettes, the grunge-inflected attitude. It all landed at precisely the moment Tumblr was busy manufacturing its own alternative-pop canon. Behind the scenes, however, the reality was considerably less romantic.
“They wanted me to be someone completely different than I was. So [the label] just shelved me,” she recalls. “But I think they really underestimate the general public. I think they think people are more stupid than they are, or they’re just sheep.”
She speaks about that period with more perspective than bitterness. Night Time, My Time only exists because she paid for the sessions herself using money she’d earned from modelling campaigns, squeezing the record into two weeks. “It’s totally not normal, and it’s not productive, the [label] took every resource from me, my freedom. I felt like if someone was being weird or being controlling, I should have to figure it out like, ‘Okay, well I’m gonna have to work around this. This is just what this is.’”
“I had been waiting my whole life to make that album,” she continues. “It meant a lot to a lot of people. I’ve always felt so misunderstood and I still do, and I feel like the album found the other misunderstood people, in a way.” That is, perhaps, the most fitting way to describe a body of work that has spent more than a decade finding new listeners. The record, to this day, still accumulates 1.4 million weekly streams on Spotify.
Yet even as Night Time, My Time established Sky as one of the most singular voices in alternative pop, much of the conversation surrounding her continued to focus on everything but the music. Her public image was frequently subjected to hyper-sexualised media scrutiny, with journalists often prioritising her physical appearance and modelling background over her merits as a songwriter. The album’s cover was shot by photographer and filmmaker Gaspar Noé, who has directed films such as Enter the Void and Irréversible and music videos for the likes of Nick Cave and Animal Collective.. At the time of release, it generated controversy because of its vulnerable, unsoftened presentation of the nude 21-year-old pop artist. “It was so controversial,” Sky reflects, “and now it’s sort of like, ‘Why?’ I don’t think people see it that way anymore, but at that time it really was. I had just turned 21.”
Most artists are allowed the privacy to grow into themselves; Sky, meanwhile, had to do it in public. “I just had so many things projected onto me at that time,” she reflects. “And I’m naturally a very shy person and very much to myself.” One person who understood was Miley Cyrus. The pair became friends while touring together during the 2014 Bangerz era, both navigating seismic shifts in their careers and public identities. “We kind of had all of this crazy stuff happen at the same time, to both of us,” Sky says. “We both were in a very transformative period of our lives and our careers. We were the same exact age.”
What she remembers most, though, is how ordinary it all felt with Miley. “We’d sit and listen to Britney Spears and go to karaoke, things 20-year-olds do, like get drunk,” she laughs. “It was actually quite wholesome in reality.” More than anything, she finally felt understood. “Honestly, she was kind of my first female friend of the same age in the industry. It helped me, having someone that could relate.”
These days, Sky is working independently and, yes, she’s finishing the infamous Masochism album.
Masochism, the long-delayed and teased follow-up to Night Time, My Time, exists in fragments; in 2019, Sky performs some of its songs live and releases the single “Downhill Lullaby”, with “Don’t Forget” landing in 2022. Still without a release date for the complete album, a fan-led “Free Sky Ferreira” movement formed online in 2021, similar to campaigns like “Free Britney” and “Free Fiona Apple”, calling for her release from her label and the arrival of Masochism, or whichever title her second album will eventually take. “I feel like people are so tired of me saying this,” she says, laughing. “But I’m finishing my album right now.”
After finally parting ways with Capitol in 2024, she restarted the project from scratch. “I had to re-record it, once I left. I just restarted the whole thing. I also signed to an independent label, which suits me more. I probably should have done that from day one.” If that sounds drastic, it’s also entirely consistent with the way Sky has operated throughout her career. Compromise has never appeared particularly high on her list of priorities.
“[The album] will come out eventually,” she says. “But I just needed to start over and reset my brain from not being there…I’m still dealing with the weight of all of it.”
That weight hangs over much of our conversation, but there’s no self-pity in sight. Just the manner of someone still untangling years spent fighting for ownership of their own work. For all the internet discourse surrounding Sky’s prolonged absence, she has never actually stopped making music. “I feel like I’ve been writing every day since I was like 16-years-old,” she admits. “I make music every day, but I don’t think everyone needs to hear every single song I’ve ever made.”
It’s a surprisingly unfashionable position in an industry increasingly built around constant visibility. Musicians are expected to be content creators now, maintaining a perpetual stream of updates, teasers and engagement. Sky has never seemed especially interested in that arrangement. “I don’t want to feel like I’m using my fans for sales or weaponising them,” she says. “It’s weird.”
There is a stubbornness to that outlook that feels increasingly rare. While much of contemporary pop encourages artists to turn themselves into brands, Sky remains committed to the less efficient business of being a person. “My music is so personal and reflective of an experience,” she says. “I do have to sometimes go to a place mentally that I don’t really want to go to in order to do it.”
For Sky, making music has never appeared to be the difficult part. Everything surrounding it is another story. “I love all aspects of it,” she says. “And I also hate each aspect of it sometimes.” Still, there is little ambiguity about what keeps her going. “My priority is being able to do what I want. Make the stuff I want and present it the way I want to, more than anything else.”
Which, when you think about it, is probably the crux to what makes Sky who she is: an artist dedicated to her truth. The labels, the delays, the headlines and the mythology have all changed over the years. That part hasn’t. “Stand your ground, even when there’s people that obviously don’t want you to do that,” she says just before we hang up. “You have to trust yourself really.”
More than a decade after she uploaded “Everything Is Embarrassing” against her label’s wishes, it sounds like she’s still following her own advice.
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