Back in the spring of 2019, Sky Ferreira released “Downhill Lullaby,” her first single in five years. A haunting ode to a tumultuous love affair turned sour, the song featured Ferreira chanting a siren-like refrain—“going downhill, it’s a lullaby”—over lush, cinematic strings. In an interview with Pitchfork at the time, she described it as the opening of a new chapter; more specifically, it was set to be the first single from Ferreira’s long-awaited sophomore album, Masochism. Three years later, though, it remains the only track from the record to have seen the light of day.
Until today, that is, as Ferreira returns with the thunderous “Don’t Forget.” (Appropriately, the song begins with a heraldic blast of horns.) “There’s a fire on your street / Terrorize the whole community,” she sings over a scuzzy, roiling Möbius strip of a guitar riff that harks back to the fan-favorite track “Heavy Metal Heart” from her debut album, 2013’s Night Time, My Time. It’s an irresistible melting pot of ’80s pop—the reverb-laden fuzz and rattling snares of The Cure, buoyant Siouxsie Sioux-esque vocals, production quirks that recall Kate Bush tinkering with her Fairlight synthesizer on Hounds of Love—but more than anything, it’s Ferreira staking her claim as one of the most exciting pop musicians of her generation all over again. “I don’t need to deceive you, I’m the real bad girl,” she sings with a hint of glee, as if poking fun at the mythos built around her in her absence.
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First things first, though, how does it feel to finally send the song out into the world? “It’s actually not as daunting as I expected,” says Ferreira. “It’s been hanging over my head for so long. I didn't want it to take this much time to come out, to be completely honest with you. But it just ended up being that way, and I have to make the most of the situation. It has added an unreal amount of pressure, but I also think in some ways it helps. I mean, at least people are excited about the music, right?” If you find yourself in a certain corner of the internet—stan Twitter, specifically—you’d be forgiven for picturing Ferreira as pop’s very own Miss Havisham: a recluse cloaked in mystery, whose every move is read as a cryptic smoke signal to her fans. It doesn’t take long to realize that couldn’t be further from the truth. “Sorry, there’s a fucking drill going off next door, and there’s construction surrounding my entire house,” she says from her home in Los Angeles, before laughing wildly. “But of course there is. I mean, of course there is.”
So where have you been, Sky Ferreira? “Okay, first of all, people keep saying 10 years,” she says. “It was not ten years!” She laughs again. (Despite the moody image others have constructed around her, over our two conversations, Ferreira laughs a lot.) “It was a really long time, though, I get it,” she continues. “It’s a ridiculously long time, really, and it’s put me in this position where I feel like I have to be Fiona Apple or something. And I’m not Fiona Apple. I don’t feel like I’m a genius or anything. I also don’t have millions of dollars behind me or a gigantic team of people, and I never have. People are gonna get so mad if I say it’s DIY, ’cause they'll be like, Oh, she’s on a major label, but in reality, it kind of is.”
It’s certainly DIY in terms of the back-to-basics approach Ferreira has taken to writing and producing the song. “I wrote all the parts, and produced a lot of it,” she says. “I think that’s also why it takes me a long time. For the most part, the resources I’ve had throughout my career I had to come up with myself. It’s just a fact, and it’s why it takes a little longer. It’s a pay-the-rent thing: I have to pay people to play my music properly, because I know my weaknesses, and it’s actually a pretty complicated song, and I want it to sound right. It was like a Rubik’s Cube trying to figure it out, but I had this vision for it, and I had to get other people to understand it to make it happen.”
Ferreira is a notorious perfectionist—sometimes to her own detriment. Night Time, My Time was finished only after Ferreira funded recording sessions with the paychecks she’d earned modeling for the likes of Marc Jacobs and Hedi Slimane-era Saint Laurent (she remains a favorite of Slimane’s, and wears a glitzy dress by Celine in the images accompanying the latest single’s release), recording and mixing the album on her own terms. The payoff was worth it. Having been first signed to a major label all the way back in 2009, and after a few false starts, the album debuted to effusive reviews in 2013, with critics declaring the long-delayed project more than worth the wait.
This time around, the delays have come about partly due to the pandemic—“It did push back some things for me,” she says. “Although, story of my life, right?”—and partly because of her willingness to keep working at a song until it finally feels finished. “I notice things that nobody else cares about,” she explains. “I’ll notice the slightest sound that feels off. I’ll notice me singing a lyric with a lisp. And everyone else is like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
“I’ve got to the point where I have to do it right, because I have no choice but to at this point,” she continues. “That’s the thing that’s daunting about it, really. There’s no room for anything to be just good enough. Not that I’d ever want to put out something that was just good enough anyway. But I also know in the back of my head now that I’m not worried about reaching everyone’s expectations, because that’s just impossible.”
If there’s one thing that should shore up Ferreira’s convictions it’s that, when it came to Night Time, My Time, she was ultimately proven right. While she chooses her words carefully when it comes to the specifics of the record label machinations that have contributed to Masochism’s delay, it feels like Ferreira has been validated in trusting her own instincts. “A lot of people don’t remember, but when I put that album out, nobody really wanted me to make that kind of record,” she says. “The first day I put it out, I felt like people were waiting for me to fuck it up a little bit. Or they wanted 12 ‘Everything Is Embarrassing’s on an album,” she adds, referring to the Dev Hynes-produced synth-pop track that became an accidental online smash. “I didn’t even have a single song like that on the album. But I stood by it, and the thing is, people then had to give into it. I don’t want to sound full of myself, but it’s a good album. The fact that people are still listening to it after this amount of time, or are still interested in it, that says something about me, I think.”
It says something about Ferreira’s talents as a musician, sure, but we already knew about that. More interesting, perhaps, is that these long gestation periods speak to a side of Ferreira that the popular image of her has never quite accounted for. Her idiosyncratic (to put it politely) schedule for releasing music isn’t out of a lack of respect for her fans, but the total opposite. “Look, people aren’t as stupid as people in the music industry make them out to be,” she says. “They can tell when something is... when you’re faking it. So as long as I’m not doing that, I think the people who like my music will be into it.
“I’m not trying to chase people with my music, you know,” she continues. “If you like it, you like it. If you don’t, you don’t. But at the same time, there were a lot of people that supported me through this, and I don’t want it to fail either, or to fail them.”
While what Ferreira has coming next remains under wraps, the goalposts of what she’s expecting after putting this music out into the world have shifted. Most of all, she’s just excited to play her new songs live at the string of festival dates she has this summer. “I think I have a different idea of what success means now,” she says, after mulling it over. “I feel like I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish with Night Time, My Time, and so I feel like if I keep the mentality of that, then it’s going to work, you know? Even if that means I have to put in a hundred times more work and fix every single detail myself, so be it. It’s exhausting and it’s draining, but at least I can stand by it.”
If there’s one thing she’ll do, it’s stand by it—even as she re-emerges into a music terrain that looks distinctly different from the one she came up through over a decade ago. “I feel like I went through a time-travel machine or something,” she says. “I got dropped off by aliens on the earth randomly and I’m trying to catch up to how everything works now. I’m like 29 years old, but I feel like I’m 100 years old, you know?” Ferreira breaks into laughter once again.