It’s 9 pm in Barcelona and Sky Ferreira takes to the stage in the spring. As the minutes go by and no one shows up, the festival audience grits their teeth. A week earlier, in Portugal, Ferreira arrived 20 minutes late and with sound problems. This time it appears at 9:10 p.m. As the brilliance of his 2013 song Boys begins, Ferreira begins to sing. She is inaudible. The music stops. “Story of my life,” he shrugs, his small face surrounded by futuristic black aviators and his platinum-haired hurricane. “We have to start all over again,” he says to his side, who seems tense. The track is off; everyone is out of time. They move forward.
If Ferreira, 29, has a trademark beyond pop music that sounds like Madonna collaborating with Suicide, that’s a bad start. She signed with a major label as a 15-year-old born in California and fiercely resisted becoming Britney 2.0. (Apparently they missed his list of Bow Wow Wow and Nico as influences on Myspace.) It took Ferreira four years, a change of label and a lot of stealth to release his fantastic debut album, Night Time, My Time, in 2013, which addressed its chaotic reputation as well as child sexual assault.
Since then, the self-proclaimed perfectionist has promised numerous releases, but has only released two singles from her second very long album, Masochism, which she swears will be released this year. Throughout the time, there have been so many public disputes with his seal, Capitol, with Ferreira often accusing them of sabotage. Their latest single, the fantastically vengeful 80’s style cut Don’t Forget, is aimed at them. This saga, which includes a reputation as a party-goer and a 2013 arrest, has made him a joke to some, while his tenacity and sullen dampness have made him a hero to others. Either way, the lack of clarity about who is responsible for the mess has produced a modern pop enigma.
Days after the festival, while I spend an hour waiting in a London hotel (the last of the three last-minute location changes), perhaps an enigma is what Ferreira will be left with. He finally gets out of the elevator and says he’s sorry for the delay – he was doing a Covid test after leaving Europe with a cough. She looks exhausted, her stellar power exhausted, brown circles around her eyes. She looks spacious as we walk into a quiet corner and as we sit down, text her classmates to tell her she’s been negative.
Ferreira performing at the Primavera de Barcelona, June 11. Photography: Xavi Torrent / WireImage
I tell him, honestly, that I loved his ensemble once they started: his voice was a storm. (To keep them fit, he says, he sings as he runs uphill.) But during the show, Ferreira only heard white noises and was painfully aware that the cynics would accuse him of skipping rehearsals, even though he had hired a monitor. boy especially and was training until 7pm, despite having almost slept. “It was far beyond the point of being angry,” he says. “I spent hours fighting to make sure there was sound in it so we wouldn’t look like idiots.”
He fired the monitor and then made the mistake of looking at the answer online. “It was weird because there were videos that said, ‘It’s so puzzling,’ and I’m literally watching the video and it’s not. It’s like the Jedi people are fooling their minds. I think maybe it’s because I don’t present myself as to be the ideal pop singer “.
You can do whatever you want with “troubled women”
That is why, in part, Ferreira still has so much devotion despite such a small catalog. It emerged in the early 2010s alongside young musicians such as Charli XCX and Grimes, who took a DIY approach to pop, facilitated by cracked software and a perfected taste for blogs. (Unlike the others, Ferreira had spent his childhood around Michael Jackson, his grandmother was his hairdresser, who told him to go to gospel lessons.) He acknowledged that his generation was not satiated by the girls of the bright pop of the 2000s and modeled something more real. . The cover of Night Time, My Time was shot by the transgressive filmmaker Gaspar Noé and showed Ferreira hidden in the shower. In Spain, her very low-energy stage presence evoked a vision of Kristen Stewart playing Debbie Harry.
In person, the effect is different. Ferreira appears non-stop, but speaks with frantic tortuosity, often returning to the indignity of last week’s shows. She trembles and coughs persistently, scratches her skin and pulls off her black dress. It doesn’t look good; it is not comfortable to witness. For the first time many times over the next two hours, he brings Capitol to the picture. “It simply came to my notice then [financial] support for the tour, “he says.” I was originally told it would happen, at least from people I work with. Then I found out that it wasn’t like that less than a month before. She laughs with a hiss.
This seems to be the crux of Ferreira’s discontent: the gulf between what he says is promised and what he receives, and the price of getting any. “It’s like being prepared to fail,” he says. He has said many times that his label did not want him to release the 2012 single Everything Is Embarrassing, but he did it anyway and it became his biggest hit. And after many incarnations of his debut album were packaged, he spent his own money (mostly on modeling) to make Night Time in two weeks. It was ranked among the best albums of the year. She says Capitol should have recognized him and let him do his thing.
“That’s what I don’t understand,” he says. “I don’t think they liked looking silly and how a 20-year-old girl hit them in her own game.” Revenge, as Ferreira sees it, is the root of this toxic relationship. From day one, she was a 15-year-old girl who told the older dresses that they were wrong. “A lot of people see it as, ‘That’s why you’re in the situation now.’ After The Guardian told them of Ferreira’s allegations, Capitol declined to comment.
He has accused the label of neglecting to leave some of his music out of streaming platforms and blocking various collaborations. Otherwise, it is difficult to draw Ferreira in detail, although his irregularity seems less like the shot of an unreliable narrator than a woman who has often been questioned about her own reality, either by the police. who told him he had been sexually assaulted (twice). when she was a teenager because she was silent, or the mercurial entrepreneur to whom she has been attached for half a lifetime.
She describes her experiences with Capitol since Night Time as a “gray list” and says the label says people don’t want to work with her. “Well, no, maybe they don’t want to work with you, in fact,” he says. She says they call her “crazy, I’m mentally ill, I’m difficult, I’m not a professional, oh, I’m a drug addict. This is, by far, everyone’s favor. “In 2013, Ferreira was arrested along with her then-boyfriend, Zachary Cole Smith of the indie band Diiv, and charged with carrying heroin and ecstasy. Ferreira’s charges were dropped. Smith was her first real boyfriend and stayed with him for a while. “Somehow I ended up paying more than the consequences for that.”
“I don’t think they liked a 20-year-old girl hitting them in her own game” … Ferreira in 2012. Photo: Trago / WireImage
Ferreira feels as if his image has always attracted a certain kind of degrading coverage that otherwise seems doomed to a less enlightened era. “Don’t the rules apply to women like me?” He mentions Courtney Love and Fiona Apple, 90’s “most admired” musicians, who experienced equally unpleasant coverage. “Women with problems. You can do whatever you want if they’re not like, save me trouble. ” [the label] I almost wanted these things to be true about me so that I could exploit them and use them as a way to sell. ”
Given that Ferreira made his debut in two weeks, why not do the same with masochism? That’s what was expected, he says. “I thought I’d go out seven years ago. But then it’s changed so long, and I changed somehow …” She becomes tortuous. Fighting relentlessly to release music left her depressed. “You don’t own the person, you know? Why did you sign me up in the first place? I didn’t mean to be anything different.”
She characterizes delays and hardships as another way to fail: “Who can live up to eight years of something that has become that other thing?” He thought he was free of all that after his debut. “It felt a lot worse this time.” So bad, he says, that it affected his creativity, feeling that he had lost control “to the point that I’m making circles all the time.”
Things changed recently when Ferreira asked the Capitol to acknowledge what had happened to him. “You literally ruined my life,” she says emphatically. “They took my life. It’s not just like a job for me. It’s literally me. It was like being literally in isolation. I felt like I was gagged and tied up.”
When chaos surrounds you, should you look at the common denominator? “Exactly,” she says, becoming self-perpetuating. “Because that’s what you know. It’s like having a skinless body. I was trying to figure out, how can I stop doing this? It doesn’t have to feel like life or death for everything to be real. It’s not even like getting out of drama. “.
Ferreira has paid for his career “in every way,” he says. “Finally, emotionally, physically.” He has chronic health problems such as scoliosis and Lyme disease. During a medical examination for a film role, the doctor noted that he had a broken rib in the long run. She intended to release the masochism before tackling her “huge” uterine fibroids, but eventually delayed working on the music to have surgery, and she’s glad she …