Sky Ferreira - Night Time, My Time

Sky Ferreira is a different sort of pop star. In this gruelling era of Mileys, Katys and Gagas, she’s an all-too-rare female artist who combines glamour – or, at least, stylised anti-glamour – with substance and intelligence. She doesn’t twirl on stripper poles or invite vom-com performance artists to join her on stage. It feels safe to assume we won’t see her shaking her rear in Robin Thicke’s face in the immediate future.

As Night Time, My Time’s uncompromising cover shot of Ferreira glaring balefully from a shower attests, the Los Angeles singer has strong opinions as to how she wishes to be presented to the world. Her debut album arrives cloaked in melodrama, the product of a five-year tussle with her label. Apparently of the opinion it was signing the usual malleable ingenue, the record company teamed her up with chart songwriters such as Ryan Tedder and Bloodshy&Avant. Ferreira pushed back, resulting in shelved sessions and repeatedly cancelled release dates. For a spell, it seemed an open question whether the LP would ever see the light of day. However, her determination to own her vision has been ultimately vindicated as Night Time is a stunning first salvo – simultaneously sad and savvy, with pop gold-dust pumping through its veins.

Ferreira is often tagged a Madonna acolyte and has indeed been upfront about her passion for both Madge and Cyndi Lauper (on quasi-hit ‘Everything Is Embarrassing’ she ramps Lauper’s gothic loopiness up to baroque levels). And yet Night Time makes it clear the decade to which she is most in thrall is not the ‘80s, but the ‘90s. For those sufficiently ancient to recall, there’s a carbine whiff of Riot Grrl about ‘Nobody Asked Me If I Was Okay’, while throughout ‘Omanko’ and ‘Heavy Metal Heart’ she sounds like the half-mad sister Avril Lavigne has been keeping in the attic for the past 15 years.

If the music is strident and propulsive, as a lyricist Ferreira is all over the place. On ‘Boys’ she thanks the lover who restored her belief in the male genre (she’d written us off as cads and timewasters) but by the time you get around to ‘Nobody Asked...’ and ‘I Blame Myself ’ she’s ready to give up again. Is she happy? Sad? Fed up? Elated? All of the above, depending on the mood you catch her in.

There’s an obvious tension between former model Ferreira’s catwalk-ready looks and her brooding, self-involved music: would we be hearing it in the first place if she looked like the back of the 17A? But then, it’s this mix of gut-punch angst and pop-star poise that makes her such a fascinating figure and ensures Night Time is a record you’ll want to return to over and over. Ferreira is what might happen were Stanley Kubrick, David Fincher and HR Giger to be put in charge of X Factor for a season, and is every bit as weird and dazzling as that suggests.