Sia returned to making records at a combustible moment in her life. After stepping back from the road and building a career as a songwriter for others she re-emerged as a recording artist with songs she had kept for herself. By 2013 she had written hits for Rihanna, Beyonce, David Guetta and others. She had also been the voice on huge EDM singles such as David Guetta's “Titanium.” The collision of writerly authority and a fear of fame set the terms for what followed.

Sia entered the sessions carrying more than melodies. Reports and interviews around the time show she was confronting addiction, intense performance anxiety and a medical history that included misdiagnoses she later spoke about in interviews. She has described both wanting to hide from fame and being compelled to sing. Those tensions—exposure and concealment, ruin and defiant craft—are the emotional engine of the record.

The decision to record again was pragmatic and personal at once. By late 2013 Sia was recording vocal tracks at home and negotiating with RCA Records. In public comments she explained she did not want the usual promotional treadmill. The contract she made reportedly did not obligate her to tour or appear in the conventional way. She intended to control the terms of exposure while giving the world the songs she was no longer keeping to herself.

Musically the record returned Sia to the large pop gestures she had been supplying to others. She and collaborators stretched electropop into places of raw breath and broken rhythm. The lead single, “Chandelier,” announced the aesthetic. It paired operatic vocal urgency with buttons of modern production. It also announced a visual strategy: Sia would often avoid showing her face and instead use visual surrogates such as the dancer Maddie Ziegler. That choice was both protective and performative. It changed how listeners received the music.

The album sits on a hinge between two careers. On one side the songwriter-for-hire who had authored global hits. On the other side the fragile performer who wanted to be nobody’s spectacle. 1000 Forms of Fear was the record that resolved that contradiction by turning vulnerability into architecture. It would also make Sia into a public figure in a way she had tried to avoid.

The album was recorded in pieces between 2013 and 2014 in professional studios and home setups. Recording credits list Echo (Los Angeles), Larrabee (North Hollywood) and The Lodge (New York) among the locations. The work was completed in the period Sia had re-engaged with making a solo record and was assembling the team she would use to shape a stark, immediate sound.

Production was concentrated in the hands of a few trusted collaborators. The principal producers were Greg Kurstin and Jesse Shatkin, with additional production contributions from Chris Braide and Diplo on specific tracks. Kurstin’s fingerprints are on the majority of the album. He supplied arrangements, keyboards, guitars, drums and many of the record’s instrumental textures. Shatkin is credited as co-writer on the single “Chandelier” and as programmer and engineer across the sessions.

The studio approach favored clarity and breath over heavy ornament. Kurstin is a multi-instrumentalist and was credited with piano, Mellotron, Chamberlin, percussion and more on the sessions. The basic method was to set Sia’s voice in a bright, exposed space and build around it with tight electronic rhythm parts, string colors and occasional skittish percussion. Many songs pair piano or organ with programmed beats and a restrained string palette. The mixing choices keep the voice forward and slightly raw.

Collaborators and session players give texture and occasional edge. Guitar work includes a credited contribution from Nick Valensi on “Hostage.” String and arrangement colors come through on tracks such as “Straight for the Knife” and “Fair Game.” On the rhythmic side Jesse Shatkin and Greg Kurstin both provided drums and programming. On “Elastic Heart” the production lineage crosses into pop-EDM: the song was initially a collaboration involving Diplo and credited on the album in a Sia solo version.

A few production anecdotes shaped the record’s identity. The decision to leave many vocal takes full-bodied and un-auto-tuned gives the album an immediacy that contrasts with contemporary glossy pop. Sia and her visual collaborators also set a public strategy during the studio campaign: she would minimize her own photographic presence and develop a surrogate performance language centered on choreographed stand-ins. That choice affected how the recordings were framed when released.

Chandelier

The opener arrives like a shock. The song was written by Sia Furler and Jesse Shatkin and produced with Greg Kurstin's editorial hand. It uses a reggae-tinged beat folded into a cinematic pop chorus. The production cuts cleanly from intimate verses to an enormous, breath-bleeding chorus where Sia’s voice climbs into the register she uses as confession. Lyrically it is a portrait of self-destruction disguised as escape. The recording keeps reverb moderate so the vocal feels immediate. As the album’s first statement it establishes exposure as both danger and method.

Big Girls Cry

This song slows the pulse and turns the camera inward. Co-written with Chris Braide and produced with Kurstin, it foregrounds piano and string-like pads. Sia’s phrasing is conversational until it shatters into an impassioned upper-register line. The production leaves room for her voice to break. Thematically it reads as a plea against stoic performance. Placed second it lets the listener feel the cost that underpins the album’s bravado.

Burn the Pages

A compact song with kinetic piano and clipped percussion. Kurstin’s production frames Sia’s conversational vocal as if she were reading a letter under pressure. The melody loops, then opens into a kind of controlled collapse. The lyric image of burning pages registers as purge and restart. In sequencing it acts as a pressure release after the first two high-stakes tracks.

Eye of the Needle

A piano-led ballad co-written with Chris Braide. The arrangement leans toward a military-march minimalism in the verse and unfurls into sustained harmonic swells at the chorus. Sia uses small dynamic shifts in the verses and then lets the chorus bloom. The sonic space is deliberately simple so the lyric—about a piercing truth or a narrow passage—registers clearly. It is one of the album’s more traditional ballads but it keeps a tension that prevents sentiment.

Hostage

A taut, nervy track with an angular guitar contribution credited to Nick Valensi. The song’s new-wave pulse and quick-tempo arrangement bring a brittle edginess. Kurstin’s production emphasizes rhythmic attack. Sia sings with a cracked intensity here. Sequenced amid slower moments, it functions like a splinter of hostility and desire.

Straight for the Knife

String textures and a deliberate, slow-bloom arrangement color this track. Co-written with Justin Parker, the song works as a torch-song confession projected through chamber-pop moorings. Sia’s vocal hovers between wounded and sardonic. The production’s restraint—sparse percussion, warm low piano, bowed strings—lets the lyric about self-surrender read as both literal and metaphoric.

Fair Game

A minimalist, string-laden mid-tempo that reads as a confrontation about equality in a relationship. Kurstin’s arrangement is delicate: pizzicato-like figures, small echoing synth beds and an emphasis on vocal inflection. Sia sings in smaller phrases and lets the implied vulnerability make room for anger. The track sits in the album’s middle as a contemplative pause before the electronic heft of the following songs.

Elastic Heart

A central composition in the album’s arc. The song has a complex history. An earlier version was released as part of the soundtrack to The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and in that form featured Diplo and The Weeknd. The solo album version reframes the song as a personal fight song. Production ties trap beats to orchestral swells and a bruised vocal delivery. The chorus is defiant. The track’s prominence on the record and in subsequent singles thrust it into major public visibility, especially after the contentious, widely discussed video that paired dancer Maddie Ziegler with Shia LaBeouf in a caged choreography.

Free the Animal

This cut pushes into more aggressive lyric imagery. Kurstin’s production lays down taut percussion and tense synth lines. The lyric imagines demolition of the self in vivid, masochistic imagery. Sia’s vocal delivery flexes between neat enunciation and wailing release. Sonically it is one of the album’s louder emotional moments and it preludes the more sustained torch of the next track.

Fire Meet Gasoline

A widescreen pop ballad co-written with Samuel Dixon and produced by Kurstin. The song builds a slow bonfire of harmonies that back Sia’s voice as it rides the chorus. The arrangement has an open, major-key sweep that recalls arena ballad architecture. Placed late in the original track sequence it reads like a cathartic flare of romantic intensity.

Cellophane

An electropop cut where synthetic shimmer and Sia’s lyric imagery combine. The production uses crisp electronic percussion and bright, transparent synth textures that underline the metaphor of being wrapped and unwrapping pain. Her vocal at times is conversational, at times piercing. As a late-album song it sums up themes of containment and exposure.

Dressed in Black

The record’s closer on the standard edition. A long, elegiac ballad where Kurstin’s arrangements provide a shadowy bed of low piano, soft strings and distant percussive clicks. Sia’s voice is allowed to hold notes and settle into the lyric’s mournfulness. Ending the album here gives it a final, inward-facing statement. It is not a tidy resolution. It is a moment of exhausted reflection.

Chandelier (Piano Version)

The deluxe piano version strips the single back to its core melody and lyric. Without the original’s rhythmic propulsion the song becomes more confessional and fragile. Sia’s voice sits even closer to the microphone. The arrangement underlines how much of the power of “Chandelier” is melodic and emotional rather than production spectacle. As a bonus it reframes the hit as a torch piece.

Elastic Heart (Piano Version)

A sparse reworking that foregrounds lyric and melodic line. The trap and electronic elements of the album version are absent. What remains is the song’s bare spine. The effect is to re-cast the track as an intimate plea. It shows the compositional strength that allowed the song to operate in contrasting textures.

Chandelier (Four Tet Remix)

Kieran Hebden’s remix translates the original into an electronic, left-of-center reimagining. The Four Tet approach folds the vocal into layered, rhythmic fragments and reorients the harmonic motion. It becomes a club-minded but cerebral take that highlights the song’s elasticity and melodic hooks when placed in a dance context.

Chandelier (Plastic Plates Remix)

This remix takes the chorus and re-tools the production into a paced, percussive house-informed groove. The vocal is often treated as texture. The remix operates as a demonstration of how a pop-slam chorus can be dispersed into dancefloor repetitions without losing its emotional sting.

Elastic Heart (Clams Casino Remix)

Clams Casino’s version turns the song inward and nocturnal. The producer’s trademark ambient trap textures slow and fragment the melodic lines and place the vocal above echoing, cavernous beats. The remix accentuates the song’s sense of internal struggle by making the space around the voice feel unusual and uneasy.

Elastic Heart (Blood Diamonds Remix)

Blood Diamonds reframes the song into a synth-lush, shimmer-heavy landscape. The beats are elastic and the harmonic palette leans toward glossy, bright textures that push the vocal into a more ecstatic register. It is a remix that favors sheen and expansiveness.

Big Girls Cry (Odesza Remix)

Odesza’s remix translates the song into emotive, downtempo electronica. Lush pads, big gated drums and reverb-heavy atmospheres turn the chorus into a wash. The remix emphasizes melodic melancholy and allows the lyric to linger in broad sonic fields.

Big Girls Cry (Bleachers Remix)

Bleachers’ take adds indie-pop grit and live-tinged percussion. The arrangement leans on guitar textures and anthemic drum patterns. It reintroduces a human, band-like energy that contrasts with the album’s generally polished, studio-made pulse.

The deluxe track additions function as a commentary on the record itself. The piano versions prove that the songs stand without production artifice. The remixes show how the songs travel across club, ambient and indie-pop landscapes. Sequencing the standard album as a tightly argued 12-track statement and then appending reinterpretations turns the deluxe version into an extended dossier. The first half of the original twelve tracks is top-heavy with theatrical hits and personal confessions. The middle holds durable, character-driven moments. The close on “Dressed in Black” allows the listener to leave a bruised and reflective place before returning for alternate views in the bonus material. Across the whole twenty-track package the arc moves from exposure to reflection and then to re-examination through reworkings. The result is a record that both announces and interrogates its own vocabulary.

The album arrived in July 2014 and immediately altered Sia’s public profile. 1000 Forms of Fear debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 with first-week sales reported at about 52,000 copies. It also reached number one on the ARIA Albums Chart in Australia and topped the Canadian Albums Chart. The commercial performance confirmed that Sia’s choice to minimize conventional promotion had not prevented mainstream impact.

The lead single, “Chandelier,” became the cultural detonator. Released March 17, 2014, it reached the top ten in multiple countries and peaked at number eight on the US Billboard Hot 100. Its music video, co-directed by Sia and Daniel Askill and choreographed by Ryan Heffington, starring Maddie Ziegler, went viral and amassed billions of views. The song received multiple Grammy nominations at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards including Record of the Year and Song of the Year.

Industry recognition followed at home in Australia. The album and its visuals earned Sia multiple trophies at the 2014 ARIA Music Awards, including Album of the Year, Best Female Artist, Best Pop Release and Best Video. The awards underscored how the record altered her standing from behind-the-scenes songwriter to a major solo artist with an unusual public persona.

Critical response emphasized voice and honesty. Reviews praised Sia’s vocal force and the emotional candor of the lyrics. Several publications placed the album on year-end lists. The album’s success also encouraged a broader conversation about artistry and anonymity in pop. Sia’s strategy of using surrogates, wigs and choreographed stand-ins became a visible model for other performers considering how to manage fame.

The record’s legacy is twofold. It launched Sia into a higher tier of global recognition while also complicating that recognition with questions about agency, consent and representation because of some controversial public responses to videos and casting choices. Musically the album influenced pop production by validating a raw, big-voiced aesthetic in mainstream charts and by showing how songs written for others could be re-claimed as personal documents. Its singles remain fixtures in Sia’s catalog and in playlists that trace 2010s pop’s turn toward confessional bombast.