It is 9pm in Barcelona and Sky Ferreira is due onstage at Primavera. As the minutes tick by and nobody appears, the festival crowd grit their teeth. A week earlier, in Portugal, Ferreira was 20 minutes late and plagued by sound issues. This time she appears at 9.10pm. As the sparkling churn of her 2013 song Boys kicks in, Ferreira starts singing. She’s inaudible. The music stops. “Story of my life,” she shrugs, her tiny face shrouded by futuristic black aviators and her hurricane of platinum hair. “We have to start over,” she tells her band, who look tense. The track is off; everyone is out of time. They move on.
If Ferreira, 29, has a trademark beyond belting pop music that sounds like Madonna collaborating with Suicide, it is, gallingly, the false start. She signed to a major label as a wilful California-born 15-year-old and fiercely resisted being fashioned into Britney 2.0. (Apparently they missed her listing Bow Wow Wow and Nico as influences on Myspace.) It took four years, a label change and much stealth for Ferreira to release her fantastic debut album, Night Time, My Time, in 2013, which addressed her chaotic reputation as well as childhood sexual assault.
Since then, the self-professed perfectionist has promised numerous releases but released just two singles from her very-long-in-the-making second album, Masochism, which she swears is coming out this year. All the while, there have been just as many public disputes with her label, Capitol, with Ferreira frequently accusing them of sabotage. Her latest single, the fantastically vengeful 80s-style cut Don’t Forget, is aimed at them. This saga – including a reputation as a teenage party girl and a 2013 arrest – has made her a joke to some, while her tenacity and sullen cool have made her a hero to others. Either way, the vacuum of clarity on who’s responsible for the mess has produced a modern pop enigma.
Days after the festival, as I spend an hour waiting in a London hotel (the last of three last-minute location changes), perhaps an enigma is what Ferreira will remain. She eventually emerges from the lift and says she is sorry for the delay: she was doing a Covid test after leaving Europe with a cough. She looks exhausted, her star power depleted, brown circles around her eyes. She seems spacey as we head for a quiet corner and as we sit, she texts her bandmates to say she tested negative.
I tell her, genuinely, that I loved her set once they got going: her vocals were a tempest. (To keep them in shape, she says, she sings while running on an incline.) But during the show, Ferreira could only hear white noise and was painfully conscious that cynics would accuse her of skipping rehearsals, even though she had hired a monitor guy specially and was practising until 7pm, despite having hardly slept. “I was so past the point of being angry,” she says. “I spent hours before scrambling to make sure there would be sound at this one so we didn’t look like idiots.”
She fired the monitor guy, then made the mistake of looking at the response online. “It was bizarre because there were videos saying, ‘It’s so off-key’ and I’m literally watching the video and it is not. It’s like Jedi mind-tricking people. I think maybe it’s because I’m not presenting myself as what the ideal pop singer should be.”
That’s partly why Ferreira still commands such devotion despite such a slight catalogue. She emerged at the turn of the 2010s alongside young female musicians including Charli XCX and Grimes, who took a DIY approach to pop, facilitated by cracked software and blog-honed taste. (Unlike the others, Ferreira had spent her childhood around Michael Jackson – her grandmother was his hairdresser – who told her to take gospel lessons.) She recognised that her generation wasn’t sated by the 2000s glossy pop girls, and modelled something more real. The cover of Night Time, My Time was shot by the transgressive film-maker Gaspar Noé and showed Ferreira cowering in the shower. In Spain, her extremely low-energy stage presence conjured a vision of Kristen Stewart playing Debbie Harry.
In person, the effect is different. Ferreira is endlessly forthcoming but talks with a frantic circuitousness, often returning to the indignity of last week’s shows. She trembles and coughs persistently, scratches her skin and tugs at her black dress. She does not seem well; it is not comfortable to witness. For the first of many times over the next two hours, she brings Capitol into the picture. “My label didn’t give me any [financial] tour support,” she claims. “Originally, I was told it was going to happen, at least from people I work with. Then I found out that that wasn’t the case less than a month before.” She laughs wheezily.
This seems to be the crux of Ferreira’s discontent: the gulf between what she says she is promised and what she gets, and the price of getting any of it. “It’s like being set up to fail,” she says. She has said many times that her label didn’t want her to release the 2012 single Everything Is Embarrassing, but she did it anyway and it became her biggest hit. And after many incarnations of her debut album were binned, she spent her own money (made largely from modelling) to make Night Time in two weeks. It ranked among the year’s best albums. She says that Capitol should have recognised that and allowed her to do her own thing.
“That’s what I don’t get,” she says. “I don’t think they liked looking dumb and like a 20-year-old girl beat them at their own game.” Revenge, as Ferreira sees it, is at the root of this toxic relationship. From day one, she was a mouthy 15-year-old telling older suits they were wrong. “A lot of people see that as like: ‘This is why you’re in the situation you’re in now.’” After the Guardian put Ferreira’s allegations to them, Capitol declined to comment.
She has accused the label of negligence for leaving some of her music off streaming platforms and blocking various collaborations. Otherwise it is hard to draw Ferreira on specifics, though her erraticness seems less like the trait of an unreliable narrator than a woman who has frequently been made to doubt her own reality, whether by the police who told her she invited sexual assault (twice) as a young teenager because she was quiet, or the mercurial employer she has been tethered to for half her life.
She describes her experiences with Capitol since Night Time as “grey-listing”, and claims the label says people don’t want to work with her. “Well, no, they might not wanna work with you guys, actually,” she says. She says they call her “crazy, I’m mentally ill, I’m difficult, I’m unprofessional – oh, I’m a drug addict. That’s by far everyone’s go-to.” In 2013, Ferreira was arrested with her then-boyfriend, Zachary Cole Smith of indie band Diiv, and charged with carrying heroin and ecstasy. Ferreira’s charges were dropped. Smith was her first real boyfriend, and she stayed with him for a while. “I somehow ended up paying more of the consequences for it.”
Ferreira feels as though her image has always attracted a certain type of degrading coverage that otherwise seems condemned to a less enlightened era. “Do the rules not apply to women like me?” She mentions Courtney Love and Fiona Apple, 90s musicians “I admire the most”, who experienced similarly unpleasant coverage. “Troubled women. You can do whatever you want if they’re not like, save-me troubled.” Also, she says, “it was like [the label] almost wanted those things to be true about me so they could exploit it and use them as ways to sell”.
Given that Ferreira made her debut in two weeks, why not do the same with Masochism? That’s what she had expected, she says. “I thought it was going to be out seven years ago. But then so much time has changed, and I changed in some ways …” She gets circuitous. Endlessly fighting to release music left her depressed. “You don’t own the person, you know? Why did you sign me in the first place? I didn’t pretend to be something different.”
She characterises the delays and difficulties as another way she has been set up to fail: “Who can live up to eight years of something that’s turned into this other thing?” She thought she was free from all that after her debut. “It felt so much worse this time.” So bad, she says, that it affected her creativity, feeling she had lost control “to the point where I’m going in circles all the time”.
Things changed recently when Ferreira asked Capitol to acknowledge what they had put her through. “You have literally ruined my life,” she says emphatically. “My life was taken from me. It’s not just like a job to me. It’s literally me. It was like literally being in solitary confinement. I felt like I was gagged and bound.”
When chaos surrounds you, do you have to look at the common denominator? “Exactly,” she says – it becomes self-perpetuating. “Because it’s what you know. It’s like having a body without skin. I was trying to figure out, how do I stop doing this? It doesn’t have to feel like life or death for everything for it to be real. It’s not even like thriving off the drama.”
Ferreira has paid for her career “in every sense”, she says. “Financially, emotionally, physically.” She has chronic health issues including scoliosis and Lyme disease. During a medical for a film role, the doctor pointed out that she had a long-term broken rib. She intended to release Masochism before addressing her “huge” uterine fibroids, but ultimately delayed working on the music to get surgery, and is glad that she did.
And some Masochism songs allude to an unspecified abusive relationship. “Once I do trust someone, I’m loyal to a fault,” she says. “I’ll stay in a situation because I don’t want to feel like I’m going to hurt them, yet they can treat me like a punching bag,” she says with a desperate laugh. She says one person gaslit her to the point of a nervous breakdown. “You’re isolated from people. And I was already isolated in a lot of ways because of what was happening to me.”
She thinks she may have taken “a little too much pride” in her difficult experiences not destroying her. “Like, ‘Oh, it didn’t kill me!’ That’s a very low standard.” She’s trying to value herself better, and was touched last week when some teenage girls messaged asking to meet. They were babies when she released her debut, yet her music “seems to be very personal for them, and it makes me feel like I did something right”. Even her recent live humiliations reflect her self-respect. “If I have to play the song five times, so be it if I have to look like a fool.”
She has also had validation from her formative inspirations. Recently, she narrowly missed out on the role of Madonna in the official biopic. “It was the most surreal thing at first,” Ferreira says of the extensive auditions. She worshipped Madonna as a kid, and went to clubs and “talked shit” in order to get noticed as a teenager because that’s what Madonna did. “And it worked!” Ferreira sang Like a Virgin with her, wearing her clothes. “And she did my makeup! That was the best moment of my life.” Ferreira also appeared in the Twin Peaks revival. David Lynch was another teenage hero. “I dropped out of school to do it like them,” she says.
Ferreira has been around so long it is easy to forget she’s only 30 next month. She doesn’t care about the number, she says. “I’m more just frustrated about the gaps between my records. And I got robbed of my 20s.” Another wheezy laugh. Since returning to the public eye, “people are talking about me like I’m an old crone now. It’s funny but because I’m not always posting pictures of myself, they’re expecting me to look like I’m 18. I don’t really have lines on my face. But also, I’ve been through a lot so it probably shows!”
She’s still working on Masochism, pleased, at any rate, that it sounds “completely like myself”. After this album, Ferreira still has one more left on her contract. “God knows how many albums I’ve actually made,” she says. “I’m glad a lot of them aren’t out now, so in a way it worked.” I hope it gets easier for her to make the work she wants to, I say, as her PR hovers. “That’s the thing, too,” she says. Most of the artists she loved (like Love, Apple and Aimee Mann) “were in their early 30s when they solidified who they were. So it’s not like it’s all over for me.”
The single Don’t Forget is out now.
