Debby Friday - The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life (Album Review)
Monday, 11 August 2025
Written by Jacob Brookman
Photo: Stella Gigliotti
Debby Friday’s second record follows her Polaris Prize-winning debut ‘Good Luck’ with more confidence, more openness, and more glittering chaos. On the surface, it’s an album obsessed with hedonism. Track titles like All I Wanna Do Is Party and In The Club aren’t hiding anything. But below the strobes, the Nigerian-Canadian artist is reckoning with self-discovery, love, and the uneasy comedown.
Built on deliberately tinny, plasticky beats of the sort you’d have heard at a low-rent ‘90s rave in a leisure centre, the record laces cheap house tropes with knowing menace. Lipsync, a camp but industrial stomp made for sweaty Berlin basements, is the obvious banger here but there are other gems.
Alberta offsets its bargain-bin synths with lyrics that gaze skyward, while Bet On Me and Arcadia splice deadpan spoken word with sentimental melody, landing somewhere between ‘Ray of Light’-era Madonna and the drum ‘n’ bass sugar rush of PinkPantheress.
The spoken word opener, 1/7 reads like a diary entry over an intentionally flat kick-snare, before the chorus detonates into full dance tent territory.
Co-produced with Darcy Baylis, Graham Walsh (Holy Fuck) and occasional guests, the diverse fingerprints only make the whole thing stranger — as if the world came to a single, sticky dancefloor. Friday sings about divine love on 7/17, brags on ppp (Interlude), and admits uncertainty on Darker the Better.
She sounds equally at home commanding the crowd or staring out of a bedroom window at dusk. It’s an album about building your own party while the walls around you wobble — and doing it to the sound of the cheapest house beats money can buy.
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