Housewife, the project of multi-artist Brighid Fry, is announcing her new EP Girl Of The Hour accompanied by the release of new single “Work Song”. The album is due for release on March 7 and follows singles “I Lied”, “Wasn’t You”, “Life of the Party.”

Speaking about the new release, she said, “‘Work Song’ is about feeling unsatisfied with yourself and where you’re going. I have really high expectations of myself but also have really unhealthy habits and so oscillate between being a workaholic and being burnt out. I wanted to poke fun at myself, while still processing it as a valid issue in my life. This song is for anyone else out there with executive functioning issues who sometimes feel like a hot mess.”

Housewife’s music began in her teens as one half of Moscow Apartment, the duo swiftly won a Canadian Folk Music award for their self-titled debut EP before changing their name and then becoming a solo project in 2022. As Brighid hit her twenties and stepped front and centre, the material that she was writing became increasingly
more self-aware and personal, too.

Brighid credits her liberal upbringing as helping to make this process of both artistic and self-discovery as seamless as possible. Having recently been diagnosed as
autistic, she jokes that her neurodivergence was on display and understood from the first moments music entered her life as a child when, unlike most three-year-olds, she became obsessed with classical composers and begged her parents not just for a kid’s violin, but also a collection of busts of Bach, Beethoven and co. When the classical music fixation gave way to more contemporary tastes, she would join her family at the folk festivals they regularly attended, playing her first non-classical performance at a Greenpeace fundraiser.

As well as offering Brighid an early introduction to the community that music can provide and the climate activism that would go on to become a big part of her life (in 2021, she helped to set up the Canadian branch of Music Declares Emergency), her family also provided a completely accepting place to explore her wider identity. As a “third generation queer”, she’s felt confident and comfortable with her own bisexuality since the age of 12. “My parents are bisexual; my grandma’s a lesbian; I grew up going to Pride so I never had a teary coming out,” she notes. In the two years since Housewife’s previous EP You’ll Be Forgiven, meanwhile, Brighid has spent time understanding that she is non-binary. “It took longer to figure that bit out, but I’ve never struggled with my identity,” she says.

“Wasn’t You” laces fuzzy guitars with a relatable tale about fancying someone you wish you didn’t. “My problem with being bisexual isn’t about being attracted to women, it’s being attracted to men,” Brighid laughs – an idea intertwined with an acute awareness of the gender imbalance of prospective partners who “have been raised and socialised in a completely different way than me, and don’t have to deal with sexism and misogyny in the same way I do.”

Largely moving away from the lighter folk of her early output and leaning into the more alternative influences that have been part of her life since attending a formative Girls Rock camp aged eight, “Life of the Party” fuses pop hooks with a grungey, cathartic musicality; a duality that fits the song perfectly. “People don’t pick up on the fact that I’m autistic automatically so they’ll think I’m this aloof, weird bitch,” Brighid says. “But then people also assume I’m this confident person who knows what they’re doing [because of my career]. I wanted to write a song about all these misconceptions about me and how hard it is to set people straight. People see me on stage and think that’s me, but it just never has been.”

Housewife
Girl Of The Hour EP
Tracklisting

01 I Lied
02 Work Song
03 Life Of The Party
04 Matilda
05 Divorce
06 Wasn’t You

Pre-order Girl Of The Hour HERE