With tinges of Lauren Mayberry vocals (and the entire CHVRCHES sound), Sky Ferreira is back on the scene with a vengeance after a nine-year absence. Sure, she’s had a few errant singles in between her landmark 2013 debut, Night Time, My Time, but there’s been no tangibility to a sophomore record until now. Titled Masochism, “Don’t Forget” marks what will be the second single from the album after 2019’s “Downhill Lullaby.” And if the tone of that song was rife for being featured on Twin Peaks: The Return (on which Ferreira made a cameo), then “Don’t Forget” is surely tailor-made for the Michel Gondry/Charlie Kaufman classic, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
While Ferreira wanted to capture the sound of “the birds in Snow White, singing underwater, while slowly being suffocated by plastic” for “Downhill Lullaby,” here, instead, she opts for a more time capsule-oriented effect. Specifically one that gives us a window into the peak era of New Wave. Co-written with Tamaryn Brown and Jorge Elbrecht, the sweeping, grandiose track had the misfortune of coming out the day after an elementary school shooting in Uvalde, casting a dark pall on things like “self-promotion” (sort of like what happened to most people with a project to promote around 9/11).
And yet, something about the lyrical contents feel apropos of the national depression as Ferreira opens with, “There’s a fire on your street/Terrorized the whole community/Little troubled girl, you see/Burning down your house of certainty.” While Ferreira’s straightforward explanation of the song is that it’s “about burning down houses,” one can’t help but interpret the larger metaphor for such imagery (which does, indeed, make listeners think of that meme of the devious-looking little girl standing outside of a burning house as though she set it ablaze herself). For as we hurtle ever-forward into a future that feels like it might not actually even happen, the idea of obliterating all the systems—founded on a house of cards—that have led us to this moment seems as though it would be the best course of action. Naturally, the government doesn’t like the notion of things ever getting so “chaotic” that they can’t shake the public down for taxes. Alas, it probably never will reach such a state because the people only have so much power before the boot stomps down on them.
The defiant air Ferreira exudes on the track is also reminiscent of another so-called manic pixie dream girl: Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet). And yes, she has been held up as a beacon for many “fucked-up girls looking for their own peace of mind,” including Halsey, who features Clem’s famous quote at the end of “Ashley” on Manic to lead into the aptly-titled, “clementine.”
Impulsive and reckless, Clementine is easily detected in Ferreira’s musings, “Tears of fire in the sky, makes me feel good to be alive/Big dreams, sick dream, used to think God’s inside us all/Keep it in mind, nobody here’s a friend of mine/You can’t keep me in line, in case they fail to recognize that I/Don’t forget, oh no, I won’t forget/I don’t forgive/Oh no, I won’t forget, oh no, I won’t forget/I don’t forgive.” The irony being, of course, that it’s precisely because Clem can’t forget that she heads on over to Lacuna to get some key parts of her memory erased. The ones that feature her ex, Joel Barish (Jim Carrey). And it’s really Joel who can’t forget when he follows suit on demanding the same procedure and the memory-erasing crew seems to have a more difficult time scraping Clementine entirely from his mind.
Perhaps because a girl like her isn’t easily forgotten, manifest in the words of Ferreira when she announces, “Honey, you can see that it’s a rotten world/I don’t need you to save me, another drama unsung/I’ll catch your disease, it’s such a raw deal world/I don’t need to deceive you, I’m the real bad girl/Mystified, armed to the teeth.” Or “Hasta Los Dientes,” as Camila Cabello would say.
There’s even room to acknowledge the creepiness of Patrick (Elijah Wood) in the song when Ferreira sings, “Nails through an empty heart that never breathes/Struck a match, now I can finally see you preying on my insecurities.” Which is exactly what Patrick does in his privileged role as a technician at Lacuna who can access the details of what Joel said and did to win her over. Which, for Clementine, turns out to feel like a bad déjà vu as she begins to piece together his emotional trickery.
As Ferreira concludes by reiterating, “I won’t forget/I don’t forgive,” we’re reminded of how she’s among many talented women in the music industry subject to the strange whims of the nefarious Label when it comes to being able to put out whatever she wants to, whenever she wants to. That much was made clear when she got locked out of her SoundCloud account by Capitol Records back in 2018. Infuriated, Ferreira declared, “I earned the hundreds of thousands of people that follow the account without my label & have never had help/paid for anything on social media or whatever. I think [of] soundcloud as the website that allows musicians to have freedom.”
With this in mind, the growing trend of female musicians who have become disillusioned with the idea of having to “perform viral moments” for TikTok has coincided with both MARINA and Charli XCX parting with Atlantic Records at the same time. Grimes, too, has openly cited her distaste for her erstwhile label, 4AD. With this being the era of true self-sufficiency in how someone chooses to release music (especially someone who already has a devout following), the proverbial label has made itself seem all the more antiquated by not, at the very least, allowing an artist to simply do what they do without trying to rein it in or control it. And surely, Ferreira isn’t going to forget or forgive that, especially since it’s been at least part of the reason why Masochism has taken this long to grace us with its presence.
