Debby Friday is a shapeshifter.
Sometimes she’s an underground rapper, spitting rhymes over gritty electronica beats. Or she’s a menacing glam-rocker, stomping through industrial drums and slashing guitars. Maybe she’s a pop star, delivering big hooks in a syrupy falsetto. She’s a pole dancer one minute, and in the next she’s slicing a man’s throat like Judith slaying Holofernes.
As a producer, singer and visual artist, Friday is fearlessly experimental, finding beauty in contrast, and basking in the liminal spaces created by the collision of disparate sounds and ideas.
“I’ve always been interested in the idea of hybridity — bringing together two things that shouldn’t necessarily work,” Friday, 31, says. “And at its core, electronic music is a hybrid art, right? It’s a human and a computer coming together, allowing the impossible to happen.”
On her sophomore album, “The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life,” — which arrives Aug. 1 — Friday sounds less like a shapeshifter than a musical demigod, endowed with the ability to deconstruct various strains of club and dance music; breaking them into discrete elements and rearranging them into something alluring and strange.
Take the single “Bet On Me,” on which Friday’s voice rushes forward like liquid silver into the crevices of a rapid, jungle-inspired breakbeat. Midway through the song, it shifts abruptly into a baile beat lifted funk carioca, a subgenre of dance music from Brazil.
“We did some crazy Frankensteining on this record,” she admits with a laugh. “That’s something you don’t hear often.”
I caught up with Friday at Milou, a café in Little Portugal, on a warm day in mid-July. Though she currently lives in Toronto, she doesn’t consider the city her permanent home. Born in Nigeria and raised in Montreal, Friday has lived what she calls a “nomadic existence,” bouncing between cities in Canada and Europe, soaking in the distinct sounds of the varied underground electronic scenes, searching for something transcendent.
“I’m highly adaptable,” she says between sips of green tea. “You can drop me into any city and I will figure out a way to make a life.”
Friday’s upcoming album, she explains, is the product of a tumultuous, but ultimately transformative period that followed the release and overwhelming success of her debut album, “Good Luck,” which won the prestigious Polaris Music Prize in 2023.
The success took a toll, says Friday: stretched thin after years of grinding and touring, her body “started going haywire.” “Every time I went on the road, something crazy would happen — I’d get sick, or I’d lose my voice, or I’d break a tooth.”
At the end of 2023, while on tour, she fell violently ill, and was diagnosed with shingles, a viral infection that can cause nerve damage.
“That was the first time I was confronted with the reality that by doing what I love, I might also be risking my ability to do it,” she says. “It sunk in that I could be harming myself.”
The health scare was a wake-up call. Feeling unmoored, she returned to Toronto and, after an extended break, made the difficult decision to part ways with her management team. Moving forward, she assumed complete control over her career: music, visuals, schedule and her business affairs.
It was a risky move, especially for a young artist whose career was blossoming but still precarious, her roots still finding their way through the freshly laid soil.
“It was very emotional but it did give me clarity. My world opened up, my definition of success changed.”
Brighter, and more accessible than her previous work, “The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life,” feels like the manifestation of Friday’s new-found clarity — an album that seeks to complicate and redefine the conventional notion of fame.
“Thought I’d want more, but this feels divine,” she sings on album opener “1/17,” her voice soaring over a twirling symphony of candy-coated synths. It’s a love song, but also a clear-eyed declaration from an artist who has discovered freedom and joy in doing things on her own terms.
Born Deborah Micho, Friday grew up listening to Fela Kútì, the Nigerian musician who pioneered the genre of Afrobeat in the late 1960s.
“That was music from the future,” she explains “He was inventing new drum patterns and opening new sonic doors, and his music had a mass appeal that went even beyond Nigeria, beyond Africa.”
By the mid-2010s, she was DJing and partying hard in Montreal’s dangerously seductive nightlife scene. The lifestyle left her with both a deep love for club music and a substance abuse problem . As her life began to unravel, Friday decided to quit drugs, quit partying and make a clean start.
In 2017, she moved to Vancouver, where her mother was living, and began to teach herself how to produce music, spending hours in the basement watching YouTube tutorials. The following year, she released her debut EP, “Bitchpunk,” a fierce slice of electropunk. Her second EP and a steady drip of singles showcased a hungry artist with a promising, if not fully developed sound.
After Friday moved to Toronto in 2022, things fell into place.
Friday signed a deal with Sub Pop Records, the storied American indie label, which was a perfect incubator for her gutsy 2023 debut, “Good Luck.”
The album found an unlikely source of alchemy in the juxtaposition of jagged industrial rock and bubbly electropop. Most importantly, though, it sounded like nothing else — from the fearsome swagger of “What A Man,” to the deceivingly gentle caress of “So Hard To Tell.” (A review in Pitchfork likened the track to “feathers erupting from a pillow.”)
Like Fela Kútì, this was future music.
That fall, a visibly overwhelmed Friday took the stage at Massey Hall in Toronto to accept the $50,000 Polaris Music Prize for the best Canadian album of the year.
“I’m in shock,” she told the audience, beaming, after gaining her composure. “I think it’s very important to protect your strangeness, protect the things that make you different. These are gifts that you’ve been given in this lifetime.”
Last summer, feeling confident and grounded, Friday started working on LP2.
Wanting to shed the solitary, occasionally bleak sound of her first record — which was recorded alone in her mother’s basement — she travelled to London, Mexico City, Detroit. She found inspiration in musical vision of the late avant-garde producer Sophie, and in the sweeping emotionality of pop giants like Lady Gaga and Beyoncé.
“I started to use my voice completely differently,” she says. “Instead of yelling, I was singing a lot softer and was able to tap into my higher register. All of a sudden I was singing in this falsetto and it came very naturally.”
The result is a kinetic headrush of genre-blurring electro-pop, one that moves through genres at a breakneck speed.
Like a long night spent in a sweaty nightclub, “Starr” contains disarming range of emotions: the thrilling highs of the dance floor (“In The Club), the nagging paranoia of a weekend bender (“All I Wanna Do Is Party”) and, of course, the melancholic comedown (“Alberta.”)
Through it all emerges a portrait of an artist who has transcended the darkness, and who is ready to embrace the solace of intimate love.
“I’ve had a lot of bad luck in the past — a lot of intense betrayals and pain. But things have slowly started to shift, and I’ve experienced this happiness in my relationships that’s completely changed me as a person,” says Friday, who got engaged earlier this year.
As our conversation wraps, and we flag a server for our bill, I ask Friday about her nails. Painted onto her left thumb is the word Lucky. On her right thumb, the word Discipline.
“I got these as a reminder,” she explains, as she readies to leave. “I’m a very lucky person, but I know that underneath that luck requires discipline … You have to show up and work hard every day. Discipline changed my life completely. One springs forth from the other.”
