Sky Ferreira Is Back (For Real This Time)

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.

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.”