We’ll See About That, Won’t We: Sky Ferreira’s Night Time, My Time at 10

I have never been more of a pop music expert than I was at the high school lunch table. I’ve listened to comedians say something similar in interviews—that they’ve never been funnier than they were in the low-stakes, high-reward scenario of cracking jokes during that daily period of free time with their friends. I’d scratch my skin until it bled over the stress of having to speak in my classes, making a beeline for the corner desk, glowering in my refusal to engage. But the second I sat down at one of those germy round tables, listening to kids cursing like it was going out of style and throwing sandwich scraps at each other, I’d begin holding court—suddenly chattier than I’d been all day.

I don’t remember a single thing I learned in AP Italian, but I remember the noxious smell of the gym as we sat in a circle, trying to listen to those Electra Heart singles out of a shitty iPod speaker. I remember holding a debate over Ultraviolence shortly after its release, arguing that “West Coast” was the best thing Lana Del Rey had done yet—all while trying to wipe up the soup that I’d spilled from the table. I could tell my friends who listened to the same music didn’t exactly share in my complete obsession with the analysis I got into, but they patiently nodded along as I attempted to dissect and contextualize these women and their work within the other music history I’d devoured. It was the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do.

There’s a transparent laziness in grouping women who happen to be working in the same medium at similar career stages together, but the years I was in middle and high school were particularly good ones if you were interested in young women with a certain visual sense making slightly left-of-center pop music. Younger people now referring to this period as “peak Tumblr days” has been my first experience with feeling like my bones are decaying in real time.

Looking back now, Lorde was probably the most important figure for us on this front. It was a moment when this weird girl who sang about isolation and belonging and consumer fatigue over minimalist backing that felt radically different for the time—all while dancing like she didn’t give a fuck, speaking without a whiff of media training—had the number one song in the country. Even the kids I shared nothing but a lab table with knew who she was. I’ll never forget the boy who sat across from me in class looking the “Tennis Court” video up on his phone, looking back up at me and saying—not unkindly, but with an air of bemusement towards the material—“Well, she’s kind of like you.” Well, yeah. That became the point.

When she made her critically lauded follow-up Melodrama four years later, having matured alongside me, she was still kind of “like me” because we’d gone through those life stages together. Not in the Swiftian sense, where I perceived her to be my best friend, but she’d grabbed onto something visceral and true that most people my age felt and was writing about it as we lived it in real time. When she went off into the weeds a little bit writing about fame and vacations and Laurel Canyon-type psychedelic creative rebirths while I was still at shitty basement shows in college, our paths drifted—but it was allowed to happen, because she’d already struck the nerve at my very core all those years earlier. Forgiveness is easy with artists like that. Once someone has acted as that conduit for you, they’re still yours, even when they stray.

The strange thing now, combing through vague memories of these tirades I’d go on, I don’t remember Sky Ferreira—who’d released her debut album Night Time, My Time a few months after Lorde’s debut Pure Heroine came out—coming up in the debates of the day. Even if she was only a few years older, she felt a step removed from our world. If Lorde could’ve been one of those girls at my table, Sky felt like the girl who never showed up to school at all—too cool, too knowledgeable, had lived light years beyond anything we knew. By the time October 2013 rolled around and we were confronted with Night Time’s album cover for the first time, all of those suspicions were true, to some degree. She’d already been shuffled in and out of the major label machine, trying to decide whether it would be worth trying to play the game if she couldn’t create exactly what she wanted. Eventually, the powers that be appeared to make the decision for her.

Raised in Los Angeles on the fringes of the rich and famous—the anecdote brought up in every interview she’s done is that her grandmother was Michael Jackson’s hairdresser, and that he encouraged Sky’s interest in taking art and music classes—young Sky Ferreira was, by all accounts, detrimentally shy. At the same age, when I was holding court over the work of her peers, she dropped out of high school after finishing her sophomore year—quickly signing to Parlophone after cold messaging producers about the songs she’d posted on MySpace and modeling on the side. When we were all desperately applying to colleges, she was putting out her debut EP As If! with a new label, Capitol, and posing for Calvin Klein and Adidas ads.

By the time I was snooping around those basement shows, Sky Ferreira started getting major music blog attention from a song she’d made with her friend Dev Hynes (the mastermind behind Blood Orange, among other things) and pop super producer Ariel Rechtshaid, the deathless “Everything is Embarrassing.” A second EP, Ghost, was cobbled together to ride the critical high, and it sounded like it; each song stands on its own but, grouped together, they sound like five completely different acts submitting to a compilation rather than a coherent statement from an artist who—unfortunately for the industry people around her—had already expressed the desire to be good, but not necessarily famous. For someone already being marketed as an it-girl for the Tumblr age, this proved to be problematic for both Ferreira and the machine assigned to package her for consumption.

I write all of this and attempt to explain the work that comes out of it knowing that I’m telling a story without a concrete—and therefore, satisfying—ending. If the “before” is established among those who know, the “after” is a decade of intermittent pulses stirring excitement before sustained periods of silence. It is the knowledge that the full scope of the situation is unknowable—at least to us. It’s conversations that omit or skirt around legal reasons, personal reasons or a combination of the two. It’s pull quotes about signing contracts when you’re 14, and how no one has to adhere to those rules but said teenage signee. It’s conversations about ownership. It’s a flurry of different Sky Ferreira Returns profiles arriving every few years. It’s alleged perfectionism to the point of torture and non-stop stories about drug arrests and almost-guarateed sound problems at every show she’s played and the question of follow-up album Masochism’s existence.

The elliptical ending is two great singles left hanging with nothing to tether them to. You can read any of those aforementioned profiles and know all about all of that—the theories, the threat of motion. You can look up Ferreira’s Instagram and listen to videos with snippets of songs with the caption “I WANT TO PUT THIS OUT.” You can read comments under the posts with “one-album wonder” conspiracies, wondering whether she’s a genius who can ride off the high of her one great masterwork for the rest of her life (making it what I’d call a Miseducation scenario), a talent who burned too brightly or played the system too well to continue (a Never Mind the Bollocks scenario) or enough trouble that she’s not worth mining for content—which in the pop world, now makes you good as dead (a what-could-have-been that might be called, with respect to the actually deceased, a Grace scenario, leaving future Masochism leaks to be the Sketches from My Sweetheart the Drunk she leaves behind). All of them, and none of them, could be true.

I have this half-baked theory that we crave mystery from our artists in the omnipresent social media age. As contrived as it may feel, now that an online presence is expected, indie bands who can afford to fall off the grid seem to prefer it, posting cryptic stories about shows and leaving the rest of the promotion to the buzz left in the silence (by comparison, I’ve seen my friends in smaller bands get bumped down on a show bill if they don’t promote their gigs “sufficiently” on socials—again, omnipresence is required with little in the way of payoff). In terms of Ferreira, I think that some of her contemporaries have been awarded that ability to disappear—Lorde comes to mind again, as does Lana Del Rey, who seems to revel in contradiction and the moving needle of public opinion, putting out new material in back-to-back years more often than not all while being maligned and revered in equal measure.

Because she hasn’t, according to her, been allowed to evolve beyond what we know of her, I couldn’t tell you who Sky Ferreira, alleged pop star, is now. If it weren’t for the fact that she’s supposedly been forced into her position, that might not be a bad thing. However, in light of that position, all we can know about her is the work we’re given. Lucky for us, it’s work that stands apart from any of her contemporaries, then or now. I might argue that it’s aged better than any of the landmark albums that also celebrated their 10th anniversaries this year.

Prior to Ferreira announcing a slew of tour dates for the fall and winter of 2023, she announced a few coastal summer performances—the firsts shows she’s played in a while that weren’t at huge festivals. As she told us onstage in July at Knockdown Center in Queens, the show was the first she’d played in New York since she was touring Night Time, My Time nearly a decade ago. My friend I’d met up with there, a fellow music writer, stood with me in the window-factory-turned-venue on a sweltering night, wiping sweat from our foreheads and leaning up against one of the poles supporting the ceiling in the center of the room before the woman of the hour arrived on stage a half-hour late, almost on the dot.

Again, because of the constant reports of tech or voice issues plaguing most Sky Ferreira performances over all those years, I was prepared to offer grace for pretty much whatever show she put on, forgiving from the word go. However, the first thing I texted one of my friends after the midnight kickoff was, “Her mic is ON and she sounds GREAT,” which was true. Though it’s commonplace for pop singers of a certain performance style and stature to have guide vocal tracks playing along with them, only backing vocals from the record were sparingly deployed—leaving the melody solely to Ferreira and an adoring crowd. It was only during the finale rendition of “Everything is Embarrassing” that she appeared to lose a little bit of steam, relying on the choir of the crowd (mostly within a 10-year age range, which allowed them to have been struck by that record at the perfect time) who seemed to overwhelm her with their enthusiasm as the night came to a close.

Donning black sunglasses and a bright yellow jacket, slowly pacing across the stage through an extremely dense cloud of fog, Sky Ferreira—both on record and in person—was an apparition, a pop star you weren’t meant to see even when her voice rattled the walls. Seeing as the setlist was comprised mostly of Night Time, My Time songs (again, I’m assuming there’s legal reasoning behind what unreleased material she can and can’t play), I stood there in the venue, struck by how urgent those songs still feel. Though the videos that accompanied the singles feel of their time to me—seemingly created to make Tumblr GIF sets, featuring Ferreira flipping her hair and walking along the chosen background and not much else—there’s a prescient feeling to the music scoring them.

Maybe some of that stems from the now-mainstream resurgence of the late ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s alternative references Ferreira was studying and culling together when no one else her age or status cared to do the same. In a playlist she curated shortly after the album’s release, Arthur Russell, Psychic TV, Spiritualized, Red House Painters and Public Image Ltd. all had tracks featured. “Omanko” had always played like a breathy, more-fleshed-out Suicide tribute, while the seething “Kristine” leaned only slightly more into the hook than the cacophony than, say, The Jesus and Mary Chain might. Whether a given song had its origins in 1983 or 2013, they arrived at this bare-bones warehouse in Queens in 2023 in strikingly great shape—maybe sounding even better than they had the few weeks they’d been recorded, mixed and mastered during August 2013. Above all, they felt furious. They twitched under the harsh blue lights.

That short period of recording time seems miraculous when you consider how fully-formed the album sounds, but the project had lived at least a few lives by the time it saw the light of day. Different versions of tracks that ended up on the final record had existed in the hands of Jon Brion, Shirley Manson and Greg Kurstin in the years leading up to Ferreira’s decision to, for cohesion’s sake, scrap all previous recording attempts and work solely with Ariel Rechtshaid and co-producer Justin Raisen. Given that the album had been several years in the making by the beginning of 2013, Capitol refused to continue funding sessions, leaving Ferreira to cover the recording costs for most of the finished album herself with the money she’d made modeling.

Though the final versions of the songs were all retooled with Rechtshaid and Raisen at the same time, there are two outliers in the album’s overarching sound and narrative: lead single “You’re Not the One” and “24 Hours”—both written significantly earlier than the rest of the tracks. Both songs in question do a great job of showcasing who Ferreira could’ve been if she’d more closely fit the mold in mind, with the latter featuring a soaring Blondie-esque synth serenade to a fleeting love for the ages (Debbie Harry has said of Ferreira, “If there’s anybody I would ever be jealous of, it would be her,” which would make me keel over on the spot if she’d said it about me), while the former makes for a note-perfect new wave sing-along that coasts on the exuberance of its guitar riff and zig-zagging melody (hearing a rabid crowd sing that “And-I’m-thinking-about…” descending chorus line perfectly before screaming the title was the real treat of that show). Though they’re excellent, they aren’t the crux of Night Time, My Time. They’re not that striking cover image of Ferreira naked in a green tiled shower as captured by director Gaspar Noé.

When asked about the further strain the cover (which is still cropped and censored on streaming platforms) put on Ferreira’s relationship with Capitol, she fairly complained that she wasn’t “going to start covering myself up just to seem more credible—I’m going to embrace my sexuality because I have every right to.” That sentiment is correct, of course, but the image has never felt particularly sexual to me. If anything, it’s unsettling—you get the sense you’ve walked into a reverse-Psycho situation, where the attacker is the pouting girl waiting under the water stream and behind the condensation on the glass, daring you to step into the knife behind her back. At other times, I’ll stare at the image and the cross around her neck seems to act as a chain, as if she’s being dragged out by her corporate handlers who she feels are suffocating her for show.

The image is the essence of Sky Ferreira, anti-pop star. It’s all contained in that stare. It’s, at once, terrified and steadfast, timid and unafraid, equal parts “I’m useless and I know it” on the title track and “When it’s with me you’re messing / I’m gonna teach you a lesson” on “I Will”. Maybe it’s no surprise, when you look at that image, that I Will was one of several working titles for the record. The thing is, sometimes I think I hear fury in things where there is none—it’s my natural inclination to seek it out, to project my own relationship with that emotion onto even the most benign work. But for all the pure pop exuberance that Night Time, My Time embraces at its core, there’s a stifled, barely contained anger idling in its delivery. What might have been produced cleanly for the star her handlers thought they were nurturing is smothered in a buzz that wars with Ferreira’s voice, like primitive noise-pop reimagined for the online era. Even if certain lyrics are ostensibly about a happy relationship, it’s hard to pretend that fury isn’t evident in the unending layers of static they hit up against. It sounds like she’s pulling at restraints.

Compare the earnest delivery of “24 Hours” to opener “Boys,” which, in theory, is an optimistic ode to a new partner, but is delivered so coldly and renders her voice so sterile that it almost feels like you’re waiting for Ferreira to pull the rug out from under you and burst out laughing. That repeated melody at the end of the chorus encapsulates this—her slightly breathless “you put my faith back in,” only to let the note thud down the scale when she sings the word “boys,” like you can tell she’s disappointed with how the sentence ended. She makes the punctuation—a sturdy, emotionless period with a sigh to follow—audible, like she’s acting out the honeymoon period’s inevitable end while still wrapped in its glow.

“Ain’t Your Right” takes a similar approach, letting a monotone delivery morph from uninterested to completely defeated, all under the relentless grind of the musical backing. It feels intentional that the lyrics are, to use her word, stilted, like the way Swedish mega-producers write English lyrics where the verbiage doesn’t exactly make sense, even if it sounds great. Really, they sound like her speaking in half-formed, hesitant promises that she knows she’ll have to deliver on: “And if the problem child is gone now / I’ll consider you / You’re a lucky person / You’re a lucky person.” When she tells you she’ll “let you slide this one time,” it’s done with the implication that she’s let it slide before and will have to let it slide again. By the last assertion that it ain’t your right, she lets the words drag, like she’s submitted to the cycle the subject has trapped her in, realizing rights don’t mean anything to people who will take what they want anyway.

The dirge of the title track—which later hinted at the potential way forward for Ferreira when alleged first Masochism single “Downhill Lullaby” seemed to mirror it most closely out of every song on the record—seems like the final resting point of this sense of surrender. Almost all of its lines are pulled directly from the dialogue of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a film about a girl pulled and prodded at by unknowable dark forces to the point where she believes she deserves nothing and knows she has to sacrifice herself in order to save her loved ones. If the glare of the cover image was icy before, it shifts here to having accepted her fate at the gnashing teeth of the wolves we’re throwing her to.

These moments are counteracted by glimpses of unmitigated anger that sparkle beautifully when they make themselves known, like on “I Will” and “I Blame Myself.” The latter in particular feels like it was beamed down from Ferreira’s future, like she knows how people will speak like they know her as her gagged silence creates a vacuum for others to explain on her behalf. Coming out of that song’s vocalless bridge, where all is still for a few bars and you think the barrage has ended, there’s a quick, extra rush of noise which sounds like her vocals doubled and pitch-shifted, delivering a final “How could you know what it feels like to fight the hounds of hell?” It’s as if she’s walked away, satisfied with saying her piece, before quickly turning on her heel and deciding to drive the point home, catching you off-guard.

The roar is her treading water in a bind that she clearly never thought she’d find herself in when she first decided to post her music online. Now, she needs to resort to keeping you on defense—if she doesn’t, you might try to own her too. After you’ve listened to this one, solitary howl of a record, you’re left with everything included in that “after.” A lot of great songs ask “How does it feel?” but Ferreira writes several times that nobody asked her how any of it felt, that her statement will go unreciprocated no matter what. Instead of a storied career of a musical auteur who has the chops to back up her ambitions, we get her asking “how could you know what it feels like?” (we don’t, she’s right), followed by the echoing backing vocals at the end of that same track and the proverbial silence I have to keep ending these points with. Even then, she’s a ghost pacing across your line of vision, barely meant to be seen from the stage.

I, for Ferreira’s sake, am hopeful that she will get to do what she wants to do and that it will happen soon. She will not need to play a girl in amber, forced to watch herself perform “Everything is Embarrassing” in black and white on a playground ad nauseam while her peers are allowed to change, allowed to breathe and shift and reinvent themselves in the public imagination. Even if she wants to do it behind a wall of smoke with just her voice to make her point, she’s earned that right. But even so, she’s left us near-perfect, tangible proof of who she is, of what she’s capable of. That all warrants this look back, even if the story is still comprised of so many pages yet to be filled.

Shortly before I attended that Knockdown Center show, someone at my day job asked me what my plans for the weekend were. “Oh,” I said, thrilled to tell anyone who would listen again and again, “I’m seeing Sky Ferreira.” As if written in a set-up that I orchestrated myself, they asked, “Oh yeah! What happened with her again?” Suddenly, I found myself very comfortable, as I splayed my hands on a different lunch table with a new audience to patiently nod along as I attempted to dissect and explain these women of pop and their work. I began talking about how the glare of that cover image with the green tile changes as you do, and I never stopped.

Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer. You can find her on Twitter @moonagedemon.