From Pamela Anderson’s Pamassance to Demi Moore’s Demissance, 2024 has been the year of resurgence among some of Hollywood’s favorite women. Sky Ferreira is the next up to enter with her Skyissance, leading with her first song in almost three years, “Leash,” for Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl.” After a decade-long, brutal battle with her old label Capitol Records, who blocked her from doing mostly anything, the label freed her from the shackles last year, and she is back with a vengeance.
Once the A24 team was in final editing for the Nicole Kidman-led erotic drama, Ferreira was invited to hop on call for a rising opportunity with Reijn and music supervisor Meghan Currier. “I didn’t do it on Zoom, because I’m not really a Zoom person, anyway,” Ferreira told IndieWire. “I’m not sure which one thought of me first for the film. I knew it was real, but I didn’t know it was going to be a reality for me.”
The 32-year-old artist is a close friend and collaborator of Charli xcx, who previously contributed to Reijn’s soundtrack for “Bodies Bodies Bodies” with the song “Hot Girl.” However, Ferreira doesn’t think Charli put in the word for her. “I don’t think that’s how it happened. I think it was more from my last album.” And so it goes, the singer agreed to write, produce, and provide the vocals for what would be the track for the closing credits of the film, called “Leash.”
“I was talking to Halina before I started working on it,” Ferreira continued, who only had two and a half weeks to finalize the song. “I started working on ideas, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I watched the film, and originally I was kind of going to do stuff that was more in line with the other music in the film, like pop-y. Then it wasn’t sitting right with me, because that’s not really what the film is about. When I started this idea, I didn’t really think they were going to go for it, because it wasn’t, I guess, the popular thing. I feel like people usually really want what makes the most sense, I don’t know, commercially or something. But I was like, ‘Hear me out, I have this other idea that I think you might like, but it is completely different than what I started.’ And, well, yeah, they went for it.”
With lyrics in the song like “in the end, nothing matters” and “I’ll never get my way,” we couldn’t help but wonder just how personal the track was for Ferreira, perhaps with some of the language serving as a rebellion to her troubled history with Capitol Records — and she agrees.
“I feel like I can’t say the word ‘space’ right now, but it’s taking up a lot of my energy and my life. It’s definitely been very heavy on me and my life for a long time. I’m pretty affected by it is what I’m trying to say. I go through my moments of not being the most positive person. I think that’s a fair assessment and I don’t know if I was necessarily in the best place mentally when I wrote it, not that I wasn’t unwell but, this year since all that happened, I’ve been having to figure out how to navigate through all of this and coming to terms with a lot of it and that takes more immediately happening, because repercussions from a lot of it is still there.”
“But hopefully at some point, it doesn’t have such a presence in my life,” she continued. “That’s what I’m trying to get to. I’ve been working towards that actually even before I was dropped. Not that I was ever going to stop making music, but I think considering the circumstances, I think most people probably would have been like, ‘fuck this.’” It’s so deeply personal to me, but also it was weirdly personal how all of it unfolded in a lot of ways, for whatever reason. I’m very frustrated by it. There’s a lot of people who are starting to understand the extent of what happened. That was literally half of my life. Within the last year, though, I’ve really been trying to figure out how do I go about this and rebuild all this, but I’m also angry that I have to to begin with, because it wasn’t fair. I think maybe that part of the song is a bit like, helping me deal with whatever I’m dealing with inside.”
She said, “I really understood and connected to the film in a way, maybe not in the most obvious way, you know, I’m not having an affair with someone I work with. I understand the self-destruction of it and having to deal with that in order to find what else is out there.”
Ferreira will also be dropping her own music video for “Leash” at some point. “I definitely have in mind a few things. It’s not going to be in an office, though. No office. I just feel like there’s just so many music videos right now; popstars linking in an office next to the fax machine, you know what I mean? They’re amazing videos and I wouldn’t want to do that, like they already exist.”
As she looks ahead to 2025 as a free agent, she wants to keep her renaissance in full swing. “My goal is to put something out right after this, because I want to keep this momentum going,” she said. “I don’t want it to just be because I was only allowed to put something out, like, every few years. I didn’t really have a choice. It’s just now trying to figure out how to do that where I’m not like, completely compromised by circumstances of how to go about it. I feel like this is like a jumping-off point for me.”
Teasing the potential project, she said, “I kind of want to do a pop song after this, just because I haven’t done that in a while. I think I’m at the point where I feel ready to do that and I think it would be nice for me to invite that energy into it to my life again.”
