After winning the Polaris Prize with her debut album Good Luck, Toronto-born artist Debby Friday is back with a bold new chapter. Her sophomore album, The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life, arrives on 1 August and promises a potent mix of dance pop, glitch, post-punk, and industrial energy, all tied together by Friday’s unmistakable voice and boundary-pushing vision.
Since emerging with her raw, self-released Bitchpunk EP in 2018, Friday has continued to evolve across genre lines. Her work blends confrontational soundscapes with moments of melodic clarity, managing to be both avant-garde and earworm-friendly.
Tracks like So Hard To Tell and What A Man hinted at her ability to spin chaos into hooks. Her latest single, Bet On Me, released on 9 July, extends that thread with defiant swagger and production that bristles with tension.
Friday began producing her own beats while studying in college and eventually moved to Vancouver to pursue fine arts. That creative cross-training feeds into her music’s layered, cinematic feel. Her debut, Good Luck, was co-produced by Graham Walsh (Holy F*ck, METZ) and accompanied by a short film, a surreal, semi-autobiographical meditation on identity and self-invention.
The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life continues her quest for what she calls “radical honesty on the dance floor.” Co-produced with Australian experimentalist Darcy Baylis (Wicca Phase Springs Eternal), and featuring contributions from Walsh, Tayhana (Rosalía, N.A.A.F.I.), and Detroit ghettotech trio HiTech, the album is rich with allusion to luxury perfumes, ancient mystics, and coded messages buried beneath the bass.
Early singles 1/17, All I Wanna Do Is Party, and Lipsync reveal a collection obsessed with transformation, glamour, and chaos. But beneath the surface, Friday’s lyrics are studded with vulnerability, desire, and questions of power. The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life might be dance music, but it’s dance music with teeth.
Fans of FKA twigs, Kelela, Mykki Blanco, and Danny Brown will find plenty to love. But no comparison fully captures the strange, thrilling universe Debby Friday is building, one glittering, glitching track at a time.
