In another comment, Ferreira wrote: “I wasn’t going to say anything. I’m over being dragged & humiliated for no reason. It brought back a lot of things I have worked really hard to move past. No one ‘saved’ or helped me. My life was destroyed for over 10 years & it’s a public joke.” She went on to describe a pattern of being taken advantage of and having situations manipulated based on other people’s perception of her—a perception that, it’s worth noting, has been shaped almost entirely by the fact that she hasn’t released an album in over a decade. Her debut album Night Time, My Time came out in 2013 to widespread critical praise. Its follow-up, Masochism, was announced shortly after—and then never arrived, The Wrens-style. It has been delayed through intended release windows in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2022, and 2025, making it one of the more agonizing sophomore album sagas in recent indie pop memory. It’s something of an industry punchline at this point, a Grand Theft Auto VI meme for the Tumblr girlies. And it’s clearly a sore spot for Ferreira, too—as she put it, “it allows people to disrespect & take advantage of me.”
Ferreira has blamed Capitol Records for much of this, accusing the label of suppressing her releases, blocking her from doing press, and even seizing control of her SoundCloud account. Her fans eventually launched the #FreeSkyFerreira campaign, which included a Times Square billboard and a plane flying a banner over Capitol’s Hollywood headquarters. Capitol quietly dropped Ferreira in late 2023, and she can’t afford to re-record the material she made under their roof—as she told Vogue, “Taylor Swift can do that because she’s a billionaire, but I basically put all the money I’ve ever made as an artist back into making music.” So when Ferreira says someone else is recording her old songs, the implication lands a bit differently than your average credit dispute. These aren’t demos from some overflowing vault of surplus material. They’re songs from an album she spent a decade trying and failing to release.
Charli, for her part, has not responded personally; according to her team, she’s in Kyoto filming a movie and finishing her next album. Her management issued a statement to Billboard confirming that a “standard review process” was conducted on tracks containing “fragments of material originating from earlier sessions,” that “all relevant parties were consulted,” and that “all credits were finalized and formally approved by the appropriate parties prior to the album’s release.” Charli has, the statement said, “her own personal history with publishing and production negotiations and because of this, she always shares credits fairly and appropriately, and values her collaborators tremendously.” Notably, the statement doesn’t dispute that earlier material was involved—it only asserts that the use was handled properly and agreed upon. Whether Ferreira sees it that way is, evidently, another matter.
The awkward backdrop to all of this is that Charli has been a vocal Ferreira admirer for years. In 2024, she called Ferreira “one of a kind” and the only artist she’d rank alongside Rihanna. They collaborated on Charli’s 2019 single “Cross You Out,” and when Ferreira landed a song on the Babygirl soundtrack, Charli’s public reaction was pure enthusiasm (as she put it on X, “I was already so excited for Babygirl but now we get Babygirl + a new song from Sky: omg. stan mode activated.”) Obviously, none of this resolves the underlying credit question, but it does make the whole thing feel a little sadder than your standard industry squabble.
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