Sky Ferreira: Night Time, My Time

The girl-gone-wrong plotline is so well-worn in pop culture that it’s hard to tell how much Sky Ferreira really has gone off the rails. A drug bust with her indie musician boyfriend (him heroin, her ecstasy) suggests somewhat, as do the delays affecting her debut album, finally appearing four years after the then 17-year-old was touted as the latest Californian pop starlet.

That background remains embedded in her music (“24 Hours” is a big, shiny 1980s synth number), but it has been atmospherically overlaid by grungy guitars and demi-mondiste languor.

An air of LA artifice is detectable too: Ferreira’s singing has a dramatic edge and the album’s cover, a Psycho tribute shot by film provocateur Gaspar Noé, places her in an aesthetic tradition of victimhood, an act of role play.

Sky Ferreira

Night Time, My Time

(Polydor)