After winning the Polaris Music Prize, Debby Friday bet on herself
The Canadian electronic musician discusses her most ambitious album yet, The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life
When Debby Friday first joined Q's Tom Power for an interview in 2023, her debut album, Good Luck, didn't just shake up the music scene, it shot her straight into the spotlight.
That album ended up winning the Polaris Music Prize, which brought Friday a lot more attention and tons of new fans. But when she sat down to write her latest record, The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life, she made a conscious decision to do things differently. Instead of leaning into the experimental sound she had become known for, she wanted to make a more pop-influenced record.
"I have made experimental work pretty much the majority of my career," she says. "That's like my bread and butter. But what I wanted to do was figure out a way to kind of, I would say, bridge the gap between experimental and then also accessible…. I was like, 'What would a Debby Friday pop song sound like?'"
Besides making her music sound catchy, Friday found that the biggest challenge of writing a pop song was that it required her to tap into her vulnerable side.
"I think a lot of people, when they meet me through my music, they see the hard side, the rougher side, the side that's more like this powerful — can I say bitch? — this powerful bitch," she tells Power. "But that side, I think, came up more as a self-defense mechanism that I developed earlier on in my life."
After winning the Polaris Music Prize, Friday made the decision to be self-managed so she could have complete control over her creative vision. She wrote the song Bet On Me about taking that leap.
"Something that is really important to me is just being true to myself and being true to my vision," she says. " I have a very strong vision. I know exactly what I want to get out of this career. And a big part of that is this honesty — honesty and clarity in self-expression, and that's not always going to look like what other people's ideas are."
The full interview with Debby Friday is available on our YouTube channel and on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Debby Friday produced by Mitch Pollock.