Sky Ferreira's rise has been just short of meteoric: She teamed up with Miike Snow's Bloodshy & Avant after their brief window of crossover fame at the age of 15 and commissioned a track or so each from professionals like Swedish indie popper Marit Bergman and serial songwriter Ryan Tedder. There was some music shelved and some routine image trouble, but she scrabbled her way back to square two with the help of more professionals: Dev Hynes of Blood Orange and Shirley Manson of recently revived Garbage. Now her protostar is brighter than ever and she's earned one of the biggest cult hits of the year. On her new EP, Ghost, she's settled into several mutually exclusive styles of music. It's official: she's the year's next big latent potential.
None of this is entirely fair to Ferreira. It says a lot about both her talent and tenacity that she's even managed this much of a comeback when every major label and producer has a basement cluttered with the discarded half-debuts and dozens of demos that never even made it that far. It helps that she's got connections from before and during her industry time, and that they're easily spun into anecdotes (her mentor, Michael Jackson! Her partner in vodka-bottle scandal, Katy Perry!). It helps that all those singles, hits or not, gave her residual name recognition. It helps that she shows candor about it, on Twitter and to tastemakers. It helps that she's got her alt-fashion and modeling gigs-- ever more necessary as industry demands layer multi-platform experience and brand support on artists like tiered skirts. And it helps most of all that Ferreira's spent the years since her debut cultivating an impeccable, or at least impeccably marketable, sense of taste. She's called her upcoming album more of a collection of that taste than a statement of an album. And though she's spoken elsewhere about how developing artists aren't encouraged to curate those collections as often as inherit them from someone else's drawer, everything on Ghost sounds like something Ferreira does genuinely like.
What Ferreira likes, it seems, adds up to a veritable nostalgia feed. "Lost in My Bedroom" burbles over with details, sounding as if Ferreira's actually lost in about 10 synthpop songs playing at once, three of which came from John Hughes movies and two of which are "Dancing on My Own". Her voice disappears into the mix as if she's disappearing into a one-girl, mattress-jumping dance party, and as soundtracks to those go, this is as gleeful as any. Earlier on, Jon Brion assists with "Sad Dream", which flitters from the mundane ("I hear your call and I let my phone ring.../ I listen to the stereo play") to the mythologizing ("I live by my own laws, I stick to my guns"), from calypso to folk, from the warbled vocals of certain Brion acolytes to the more petulant, wailing sort. It never quite lands on a chorus, but it never quite needs to; the hesitation fits the subject matter. The same can't be said, alas, of "Ghost", Ferreira's alt-country track. The songwriting's evocative enough, and Ferreira emotes with enough stirrings of yearnings, but they sound more aspirational than heartbroken. She's crying out for someone, but not as loudly as the track cries out for its Emmylou Harris.
Nobody's asking Ferreira to be an alt-country singer, though. She fares better and sounds far more comfortable on tracks like the Manson-penned "Red Lips". It's essentially a Garbage B-side shorn of a pre-chorus, and it wears its concept as brightly as its colors, but Ferreira sells it with a distant, almost tossed-off vocal. There's distance in Hynes' "Everything Is Embarrassing", too, but a different sort. Where "Red Lips" is haughty, this is sullen; where Ferreira snarls out the former's chorus, "Embarrassing" sees her really dancing on her own, her melody too plaintive, her vocals too understated, and the beats too hazy to register much beyond resignation. It's not a come-on, as some have written, nor is it the anthem it's clearly trying to become (and that the inexplicable overproduction on the Ghost re-recording seems to try to make it). It's a gift to everyone more apt to mumble "I wouldn't bother" than attempt a diva kiss-off, and it oozes relatability, which may be her greatest strength.
Ghost demonstrates well enough Ferreira's versatility, certainly her stylishness, but even more than those, it shows her empathy. At this point, she could probably carry an album on any one of those three, but it's probably not a coincidence that of her myriad, varied singles, she was granted her first true breakout from the latter, from a human-sized dance song. It probably won't be a coincidence either if that's the trait to grant her staying power.
