Chartbreaker: Freya Skye Opens Up About ‘Silent Treatment’: ‘Sometimes I Want to Cry, Sometimes I’m Dancing’
The singer-songwriter-actor's first Billboard Hot 100 entry reached a No. 14 high on Pop Airplay.
Black News 
When Freya Skye began writing her eventual breakthrough solo single “Silent Treatment” last spring, she was an aspiring pop star from Buckinghamshire, England, best known for representing the United Kingdom in the 2022 Junior Eurovision Song Contest.
Skye recalls crafting a “rough outline” of the track alongside cowriters Sophie Simmons and Max Margolis back in May 2025: “We didn’t feel like we’d nailed it,” she says. “We were like, ‘Let’s just park it and wait for inspiration to strike again.’ ”
She kept busy until then, making her film debut with her role as Nova Bright in Disney Channel’s Zombies 4: Dawn of the Vampires that July — which introduced her to an entirely new audience. And at last, in September, inspiration did strike again. “One morning, the concept came to me,” she recalls of cracking the infectious pop single infused with guitar and drums. “We rewrote the whole song, took everything we had before and pieced it all together. It felt almost like a dream.”
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In many ways, Skye was already living out her dreams of pop stardom. After the premiere of Zombies 4 last summer, Skye became one of seven Disney stars on the 43-date Descendants/Zombies: Worlds Collide Tour that hit arenas across North America, including Madison Square Garden in New York — but she still longed to perform her solo music to her own fans. “I’m so close with my fans, and I know what we both like.”
Her confidence translated into a sense of urgency, with the 16-year-old insisting to the Disney-owned Hollywood Records — which signed her to a record deal in 2024 at the time of her Zombies 4 casting — that “Silent Treatment” be released “as soon as possible.” The single came out in early December, just in time to test-drive it during her stint as a presenter and special guest performer across several dates of the iHeartRadio Jingle Ball Tour, which put her right back in arenas across the U.S.
“I felt a lot of impostor syndrome [being] surrounded by these established artists that I’m inspired by,” Skye says of the lineup, which included Ed Sheeran, Zara Larsson and Olivia Dean. But that trepidation melted away once she hit the stage: “I started singing the first chorus, and people knew the words. I was so taken aback. I was like, ‘The song’s been out for three days!’ ”
It’s continued to win over new listeners in the months since, reaching a No. 14 high on the Pop Airplay chart and marking Skye’s Billboard Hot 100 debut in April. “I woke up and there was a text from my team saying, ‘Freya, you’ve made it onto the Billboard Hot 100,’ ” she marvels, at one point putting her head in her hands and wiping away tears in disbelief. “Look at the names that I’m surrounded by: They’re the people who I used to sing songs in the car with my family with. They’re the people who I have grown up with.”
That includes Taylor Swift. As a self-proclaimed “proud Swiftie” (she calls going to Swift’s The Eras Tour at London’s Wembley Stadium in 2024 “the best night of my life”), Skye understands that “bridges are such a huge thing in pop songs” — and “Silent Treatment” delivers in droves, starting with the shout-along and wise-beyond-her-years lyric “You’re a narcissist, I’m an optimist, name a deadlier combo.” “Getting the silent treatment is such a universal experience,” Skye says. “[But] there’s a fun energy to it that’s just infectious. Sometimes I’m listening to it and I want to cry; sometimes I’m dancing; and sometimes I’m just grooving while doing my homework.”
Skye’s manager, State of the Art’s Nick Bobetsky — who previously shepherded Chappell Roan’s rise and connected with Skye in 2024 through Hollywood Records — credits that Swift-coded fan bond with the teen artist’s growing success. “There aren’t a lot of fair-weather Freya fans,” he tells Billboard. “If you’re a Freya fan, you are searching, sharing, consuming, you’re spreading the word. Her fans are really loud for her.”
Bobetsky notes that while they’re making the most of her ever-growing Zombies fanbase, he’s not necessarily looking to follow in the exact footsteps of other high-profile Disney-to-pop success stories like Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez. “The road map that is really valuable is knowing [the Disney] system, it’s such a massive accelerator when it comes to exposing young artists to young fans,” he says. “The piece that I think we’re really prioritizing is to not just rely on that.”
What already separates Skye is that she’s having her top 40 breakthrough at the same time that she’s still firmly part of the Disney ecosystem, chatting with Billboard while filming Zombies 5 in New Zealand, set for release in 2027. “The stereotype that has been created, and I felt like one that I was going to have to follow, was like, ‘OK, I’ll do Disney. Then one day, unfortunately, that journey will come to an end, and then my music career will begin.’ The fact that they’ve been able to coincide is something that, honestly, I was surprised by and [feel] really lucky for.”
After filming wraps, Skye will continue on the road for her Stars Align Tour — in support of her February Stardust EP — for 40 additional dates beginning in June that will take her to Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. She’s been outspoken about keeping tour tickets in her fans’ hands after seeing scalpers resell $30 tickets to her sold-out solo acoustic shows late last year for “thousands of pounds.” She’s using tools like Ticketmaster Face Value Exchange and offering separate VIP upgrades to ticketholders to keep bots from targeting premium seats. “Keeping tickets as affordable as possible is so important, especially with my fanbase where we’re all teenagers and young girls. You never want to close people out because of how expensive your ticket prices are.”
Considering her poignant songwriting and professional poise, it’s easy to forget how young Skye still is. She and Bobetsky both credit her parents, along with her friends and the rest of their team, for keeping her grounded as her career takes off.
Even though her songs are spreading far and wide at the moment, Skye knows there are still plenty of pop fans left to win over. “It’s one of my favorite things when I see someone saying, ‘Who is she?’ It excites me. I’m like, ‘There’s so many more people I have the opportunity to reach and find.’ Maybe it’s meant as an insult, but I find it quite thrilling.”
A version of this story appears in the May 9, 2026, issue of Billboard.
