The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life

In ancient Babylonia, stargazers looked up at the cloudless night sky and saw a blazing ball of light. Burning brilliantly, the celestial body appeared to be a luminous sign from the great beyond. They were looking at what we now call Vega, the fifth-brightest star visible from Earth. Debby Friday was learning about these heavenly bodies in between nonstop touring across Europe, following the otherworldly success of her thunderous debut album GOOD LUCK, which dominated dance floors and took home the auspiciously astrological Polaris Prize upon its release in 2023. She learned about Vega and the way its placement in a birth chart lends the gifts of creativity, acclaim and bravery—as long as its recipient is humble enough to receive them. 

On her kaleidoscopic second album, The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life, Friday defines success on her own terms. “I want to be a starrr, I can't hide that desire,” she says. “But what I don't want is to live someone else’s dream. I don’t want to follow a pre-set path, to do things ‘the way it's always been done.’” For the Nigerian-Canadian polymath, to be a starrr is to live at the extremes, the balance of public versus private, hubris versus humility, flying versus falling. “I don’t write all my thoughts down/ Scared of the permanency,” she sings at just above a whisper over a crystalline breakbeat on “Bet On Me.” 

Being a starrr means embracing the apocalyptic hedonism of an all-night rave—finding communion in the “dark room, girls in line for bathroom” on the buzzing house anthem “All I Wanna Do Is Party”. It means swapping lines about bottles on ice and getting freaky on the dance floor with Detroit techno prodigies HiTech on “In The Club”—while admitting that she is, in fact, “barely on the dancefloor these days.”  It’s the sound of discovering what comes after the kind of success most artists only dream about—how to burn brightly without burning out. Across 11 songs, The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life showcases Friday’s chameleonic vocals. From the sparse, gossamer beauty of the lovelorn “Leave.” to the locomotive post-punk of “Darker The Better,” Friday has never sounded more vivid and versatile.

From the very start of her second album, Friday embodies extremes. There’s the salaciously evocative juxtaposition of “poetry and nude selfies” on the slinky and seductive ode to a lover “1/17”; the push and pull of muse and artist on “Higher”; the shock of following a line like “Do you like the way that I dance?” with “Could you cut to the core of my matter?” on “Arcadia,” itself a song divided between French and English, her two native tongues. To Friday, the boundaries between supposed hierarchies—love, power, sex, taste—are just opportunities to exit her comfort zones. “You can learn a lot about yourself—and about the world—when you take things to the edge. I want to know all that there is to know,” she adds.  

Winning a Polaris Prize only made Debby Friday want to grind harder: “I’m tryna see more/ Man, I want the payoff” she raps over an onslaught of laser-like synths on the effortless copycat kiss-off “Lipsync.” It’s not just an affectation: “I work myself to the bone,” she admits, recounting her nonstop schedule since the release of GOOD LUCK. But life on the razor’s edge can only be sustainable for so long: “I started losing my voice at the end of every show,” she remembered. My body was just giving me signals that I needed a big change.” During a tour in support of the album, she suddenly fell violently ill. The diagnosis? Stress-induced shingles. That experience, along with other personal challenges, forced Friday to turn her focus inward. “I was really shocked to realize how much of my personal life was in disarray,” she recalled. The next year saw a change in management, her routine, and her priorities. 

She found empowerment in putting the pieces of her life back together, a journey she documents in part on “Alberta,” a strikingly intimate letter to her partner. “‘Alberta’ is one of the most personal songs on the record,” she says. “It’s about loving someone who is struggling and the emotions that are part of that. I wanted to write about these feelings in a straightforward and true way. I wanted to be honest.” There is a profound universality in sharing the microscopic details of her love life, the kind of emotions only lived memories can provoke— “Remember those nights in Alberta/ Top down, on the hood of the Porsche?” she reminisces. Layered with meaning, The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life is brimming with coded, if-you-know-you-know references—weaving love letters and innuendoes from the names of it girl perfumes, a favorite brand of French cognac, and Hellenistic prophetesses who speak in tongues. 

To help her bring her vision of radical honesty on the dance floor to life, Friday recruited Australian producer Darcy Baylis (Wicca Phase Springs Eternal). The pair met while Friday was on tour in Australia in 2023 and clicked immediately, with Baylis eventually joining Friday’s live band as a guitarist. They returned to her de-facto homebase in London in between touring, trading ideas in the studio from morning until midnight. “The sound of the album is largely a result of the synergy between myself and Darcy,” Friday said, “and just taking in the energy of the city.” Taking inspiration from an eclectic mix that included the gurgling glitch of early M.I.A., the righteous fury of Canadian noisemakers Death From Above, and the bubblegum effusiveness of SOPHIE, The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life is a manifestation of Friday’s pursuit of a pop sound that still feels distinctively hers. 

Their collaboration also pushed Friday to explore the range of her singing. “I don't think I thought of myself as a singer before this album, but working in the studio with Darcy gave me confidence in my voice.” She sings textured sweet nothings on “Higher,” her voice hovering above the song’s hypnotic beat as if casting a spell. On the deliciously braggadocious “ppp (Interlude),” she wraps the world around her finger with her deadpan: “Baby, you’re a believer.” Friday leans into softness in the moments where it’s least expected—on the wobbly dance floor thumper “Arcadia,” she sings, voice honeyed and gentle, about a “feminine vision.” “Will you drink from the flow of my water?” she asks, her voice dancing between wanton desire and coyish seduction. It’s a careful balance she maintains throughout The Starrrr Of The Queen Of Life, rediscovering her voice by excavating its farthest reaches. 

It is said that in the grand map of the cosmos, Lyra, the constellation in which Vega appears, takes on the shape of a falling eagle. It reminded Friday of another winged beast, the Greek mythological figure Icarus, whose belief in his own abilities took him just close enough to his goals to see them all undone by his own hubris. The artwork for her second record aptly features Friday, inverted on a column, seemingly rising and falling at once. “This album is about this idea of reaching towards something,” she says. “It’s about seeing the signs and trying to follow that impulse, always with an undercurrent of the potential of either flying into the sun or falling back to earth.” On The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life, Debby Friday takes flight, fastening her wings, following the sound of her own voice.