DEBBY FRIDAY actualizes her potential on her sophomore album, The Starrr of the Queen of Life. The follow-up to her 2023 Polaris Prize-winning debut, GOOD LUCK, posits that everyone is a star with a unique gift to offer the world, and actualizing one’s potential is what life is all about.

To do so often requires taking risks. In the Nigerian-Canadian artist’s case, that means opening up more and more details about her life and showing more vulnerable than ever. “I’m your poet / You’re my muse / You can’t help but to give me the blues / Pull the trigger / Pull the thread /You’re the voice inside my head / Oh, all this need / Oh, baby please / I am on my hands and knees,” she professes and pleads on the sleek and incandescent “The Darker the Better.”

In a wispy voice on the spry “Bet on Me,” she confesses, “I don’t write all my thoughts down / Scared of the permanency / Scared of what just might happen.” Though she’s reluctant to say out loud her hopes and desires because she would feel external pressure to achieve them, she’s taken the leap towards her goals, and there’s no going back now.

FRIDAY also displays her most loving emotions yet on The Starrr. “7/17” commemorates the day she and her partner met. “Remember those nights in Alberta? / Top down, on the hood of the Porsche? / You my lover, my rider / I’m your star, I’m your lighter,” she asks on “Alberta,” one of the most personal songs she’s ever written. Its spacious electronics evoke the open sky I imagine the couple staring up at.

Signs from the universe led FRIDAY to the divine love reflected in the ebullient bubbling pop of “7/17,” but signs also bombard her as ominous omens. Though she prefers quiet nights in these days, she hasn’t forgotten her roots: she came of age in clubs. She keeps the party going with
the indulgent, full-on revelry of “All I Wanna Do Is Party,” a pop song at the end of the world. It’s a world where everything feels like it’s teetering on the edge of collapse, be it the music industry, civilization, or the planet as a whole. Despite her best attempts to ignore such signs, they’re too persistent, too overwhelming.

As FRIDAY has grown older and more experienced in life and art, her goals and ambitions have grown too. It’s evident in The Starrr’s more expansive production and musical experimentation. The Starrr is more dynamic and exploratory than its predecessor. Between tour dates in support of GOOD LUCK, FRIDAY and her live guitarist, Melbourne producer Darcy Baylis, hunkered down in a studio in London. Together, they channeled the city’s adventurous appreciation of electronic music into the album. Add producer Graham Walsh of Toronto electronica titans Holy Fuck, as well as Argentinian DJ Tayhana and Detroit ghettotech trio HiTech to the mix, and the result was a dynamic electronic pop gem.

While The Starrr finds FRIDAY at her most tender, the album still contains flashes of volatility, like on “Lipsync,” and decadent braggadocio. Hear the sultry “pussy pink princess (Interlude)” where she refers to herself as a “precious stone” before continuing, “Platinum everything / So I
shine like chrome.” True, FRIDAY is shining as cracks form and widen around her – around all of us. But she’s always been a world-builder. She’s always laid her own foundations, sought pleasure in crushing times, and created revelry when she couldn’t find it. On The Starrr of the
Queen of Life, she does so with greater self-assurance than ever.

Order The Starrr of the Queen of Life by DEBBY FRIDAY HERE