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Sky Ferreira Defined an Era—but Never Let It Define Her

Revisiting ‘Night Time, My Time’ and early-2010s Tumblrcore as the indie-pop star’s first—and only—album turns 10 this weekend
Getty Images/Tumblr/Ringer illustration

In May, Sky Ferreira announced her first headlining tour dates since 2016. There was an air of mystery about it: The shows were in celebration of a Los Angeles promoter named Minty Boi (?) and there were blatant misspellings on the app that the tickets were sold on. Considering Ferreira’s enigmatic persona, maybe this was all par for the course. After all, the elusive pop-rock vocalist has yet to follow up her debut (and only) record, the juggernaut Night Time, My Time, which turns 10 on Sunday.

At the Los Angeles show on July 8, loyal Ferreira fans came out in droves to hear the decade-old songs. Still, it was clear others were feeling apprehensive about the affair, as there was a missing-person sign tacked up on the wall outside the venue. “Have you seen Sky Ferreira?” it read. “Sky Ferreira was kidnapped by her label Capitol Records and they’ve been holding her hostage for 10 years. She has tried to release her second album since 2015 but Capitol Records blocks the release.” 

This kind of rhetoric was borne out of Ferreira’s documented struggles in the music industry, which she’s spoken about candidly throughout her career, and from conversations among her fans online. Most notably, these conversations thrived on Tumblr, the microblogging platform known for aesthetic-building that became essential for alternative-leaning music fans in the early 2010s. Ten years later, hypotheses about the disputes in Ferreira’s career have followed her around just as much as her output has. She’s defined by her lack of music as she is by the small amount that does exist. 

But Night Time, My Time wasn’t the beginning of Ferreira’s career obstacles. These hurdles defined her career before it could really get started, and they became fodder for profiles with headlines like “Sky Ferreira and the dark side of the music biz.” She signed to Capitol Records as a teenager and put out singles like the Europop cut “One” and the shout-along “Obsession” in 2010, working with the likes of Swedish electronic duo Bloodshy & Avant and OneRepublic frontman/journeyman pop producer Ryan Tedder. Within a few years, she was speaking to the media about being overworked and creatively stifled during this phase of her career. “[The label was] like, ‘If you do this then you can do whatever you want later,’ which wasn’t true,” she told The Guardian in 2013 about recording “Obsession.” “They wanted the new American pop princess—someone who was naughty but, like, grinning,” she told The Fader about her label the same year. “I wasn’t scared to tell these grown men record executives, like, fuck off.”

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“[Her first] attempts at major label pop songs, I don’t think they actually had any real success,” The New Yorker’s Carrie Battan, who reviewed Night Time, My Time for Pitchfork in 2013, says. “But indie kids and critics sort of glommed onto them and were like, ‘This girl’s cool. The fact that she failed is cool.’ Which she hasn’t really been able to escape to this day.”

Ferreira’s initial debut album was scrapped and reworked, and the details of her and her label’s dispute over the project aren’t fully known, but her reputation as an underdog was cemented. She eventually wrangled more creative control over her music and brought in new collaborators like Dev Hynes, Ariel Rechtshaid, and Dan Nigro. The overhaul was complete in 2012 when she released “Everything is Embarrassing,” a hushed anthem for anxiety-riddled romance, accompanied by a black-and-white music video in which Ferreira, with near-white bleached hair and dark eyeliner, solemnly croons to the camera. Suddenly, she shifted from a cultural curiosity to a burgeoning, undeniable talent that had been masked under glossy pop she didn’t believe in. “It was a victory in whatever remaining war was left between people who liked indie and people who liked pop,” Battan says. “It was the perfect music for both sides because the sound of pop and very accessible music could be laundered through this indie aesthetic.”

Ferreira had started her career on Myspace, where she posted her earliest tracks and was discovered and signed at age 15. She eventually also established a presence on Tumblr, where she cultivated a large following. Though Tumblr was never a conducive platform for hosting audio, the site became synonymous with alt-pop-leaning musicians with moody or trendy aesthetics, like Charli XCX, Lana Del Rey, Odd Future, and Ferreira. On Tumblr were fans who paid just as close attention to things like style and media narratives as they did to the music, and they tended to be savvier about the industry than the average pop fan. “Just having something that really is designed mechanically to have public facing discussions about artists,” Katherine St. Asaph, author of Stereogum’s Chained to the Rhythm column, who reviewed Ferreira’s Ghost EP for Pitchfork in 2012, says of Tumblr. “[It] encouraged, through its UI and mechanics, just obsessive documentation and speculation about everything.” Plus, users could often interact with their favorite artists directly on the platform, emphasizing the perceived closeness of the parasocial relationships. This happened most famously with Taylor Swift, who contacted fans via Tumblr to mail them Christmas gifts.

In Ferreira’s case, there was an urge among fans to protect her from the major label suits who seemingly wronged her. St. Asaph compared it to the “Free Fiona” fan campaign from around 2004 when Fiona Apple’s third album, Extraordinary Machine, faced multiple delays and was eventually rumored to be shelved, leading to speculation that there was a dispute between Apple and her label, Epic Records. The grassroots campaign achieved national attention as fans protested outside of the Sony offices and mailed them foam apples until Extraordinary Machine was eventually rerecorded and released in 2005. 

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While “Free Fiona” was organized via early HTML websites, Tumblr provided an accessible place to find and engage with this kind of industry-insider conjecture. “It did feel like you were able to find your people better,” music journalist and author Annie Zaleski, who reviewed Night Time, My Time for The A.V. Club in 2013, says of the platform. “And I think because hashtags were so popular on Tumblr, you were able to dial in a campaign really well and really succinctly.” St. Asaph emphasizes that despite what fans may suspect, there are often details about album delays and label clashes that never become public. “Not all of [the speculation] is probably based in reality,” she says. “Unless somebody has insider knowledge, no one ever knows what the full story is.”

Night Time, My Time was lauded upon its long-awaited release in October 2013, and filled with textured garage-pop that maintained the same candor in the songs as she had in her interviews. Some of the lyrics seemed to echo the battles she had already fought in the lead-up to her first album. “I’m just a face without a choice / I trust you’d never like to guess what I think above these shoulders,” goes the cathartic “I Blame Myself.” “Ten years old without a voice / I feel like nothing’s really changed, now I’m just a little older.” “Shaking your head while I try to explain / You say you don’t want to hear me complain,” she snarls on “Nobody Asked Me (If I Was Okay).” “Just tryna get my point across / You don’t seem to care if I’m feeling lost.” 

“I’m sure that it wasn’t necessarily intended as that at the time, but a lot of the bitterness in some of the singles just really hits a lot harder now that it’s become clear that there was a lot of friction and volatility [in her career],” St. Asaph says. The vulnerability in Ferreira’s songwriting, compounded with what was known about her label issues, furthered her underdog status while continuing to establish her powerhouse talent.

Ferreira’s story hit deeply with the users in certain corners of Tumblr, many of whom were teenagers and used the platform to post openly about their feelings. “[Ferreira said] people were trying to take advantage of her musically or trying to make her into something that she wasn’t,” Zaleski says. “That is so deeply relatable if you’re a teenager because you’re trying to find your way and you don’t want anyone to tell you what to do. You want to carve out your own path in life.” 

A decade passed, and other Tumblrcore alums graduated to beloved records and film scores (Dev Hynes, Charli XCX), controversy (The 1975, Grimes), or just flat-out superstardom (Lorde, Lana Del Rey), while Ferreira and Night Time, My Time stayed preserved in amber in 2013. A couple rounds of press have prematurely heralded her return, but other than a couple singles, the follow-up to Night Time, My Time—announced in 2015 as Masochism—has yet to see the light of day. Ferreira still discusses her issues with her label, albeit more vaguely now. “I’ve been at the mercy of people the last few years,” she told Pitchfork in 2019. At the beginning of this year, she posted a snippet of a still-unreleased song on Instagram that she said was recorded in 2019 and inexplicably delayed. “Being ‘difficult’ or ‘high strung’ doesn’t give people the right to damage and stall my career,” she wrote on her Instagram Story at the time. “I am in a DIFFICULT situation and I have to be ‘difficult’ to get through it.” 

The absence has fueled further calls to action regarding the surmised adversarial relationship between Ferreira and her label. In August, fans bought a billboard in Times Square to display “Free Sky Ferreira,” and a month later a plane flew over Capitol Records waving a banner with the same demand. A petition to the label to allow Ferreira to release Masochism currently has over 6,000 signatures. 

The conversations about Ferreira’s career have now grown from Tumblr onto Instagram and Reddit, reflecting how music industry knowledge has become much more common among pop fans in the last 10 years. “Fans are so savvy about chart placements and about, ‘How are we going to help our favorite artists become successful?’” Zaleski says. “There’s a lot more investment in careers and success, and I think the very tiny seeds of that were probably sown during the Tumblr era.” Smaller-scale, but similar speculations have been made about artists who also had strong Tumblr followings. Charli XCX, Ferreira’s closest kindred spirit, was at the center of fan theories when her storied Sophie-produced album XCX World was shelved in 2017. Carly Rae Jepsen has even gotten the underdog treatment, seen as a great artist who fans think hasn’t gotten the recognition she deserves due to some inefficiency on the label’s end.

Today, @chartdata, a Twitter account that posts dry stats about the Billboard charts, has over 2 million followers and replies sections that are littered with pop star fan accounts. People now commonly know what master recordings are, thanks to Taylor Swift’s dispute with her former label (which she not coincidentally first addressed on Tumblr). Pop fans feel more inclined to stay informed on music industry goings-on as the simultaneously intimate and public nature of Tumblr made the urge to protect your favorite artist go from a niche phenomenon to practically a prerequisite for modern pop fandom. But even so, someone like Swift, whose advocacy for artists owning their music is admirable, will never be seen as an underdog the way someone like Ferreira is. 

But Ferreira’s underdog story isn’t just due to the circumstances of her career—the music also really is that good, and it’s sad to not have more of it. Even as mystique has built up around Ferreira with each passing year, the music stands the test of time to keep fans seeing her as someone worth rooting for. “Every single song holds up to this day,” Battan says of Night Time, My Time. “I look back [at Tumblr-era music] and I think her stuff has the most staying power.” Night Time, My Time also put Nigro, who is now Olivia Rodrigo’s closest collaborator and has worked with smaller-scale pop sensations like Caroline Polachek, Conan Gray, and Chappell Roan, on the map, and Ferreira’s image as a pop musician with a strong artistic vision has become a more viable path among the new crop of pop stars. “I think you can draw a direct line from her to people like Billie Eilish, who are very firmly in mainstream pop in a way that [Ferreira] wasn’t necessarily, but do still have more of this confrontational aspect, and at least seemingly a bit more creative control,” St. Asaph says. “Olivia Rodrigo would kill for any of these songs,” Battan adds.

Night Time, My Time is still in pretty significant rotation these days—especially with the wave of Tumblr nostalgia already cresting, as Tumblr parties have started popping up at nightclubs. “I really do think it’s people being nostalgic for a period in time when the internet was so exciting and not just this … totally numbing force in our lives,” Battan says. While a lot of the music does hold up, it’s clear that Tumblr did also represent an ethos that was bigger than just the music itself: It provided an entire curated lifestyle open to collaboration and connection, for better or for worse.  

Whether Ferreira ever does put out a new record, Sky’s reputation as a resilient artist who believed in her own vision will be looked back on fondly. “That’s deeply admirable because a lot of artists don’t get that chance to do that,” Zaleski says. “And that’s a completely fantastic legacy, even if she never releases anything else.”

Julianna Ress
Julianna is a writer and fact checker based in Los Angeles. She covers music and film and has written about sped-up songs, Willy Wonka, and Charli XCX. She can often be found watching the Criterion Channel or the Sacramento Kings.

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