The usual boom-and-bust cycles of growing up -- breaking down, gathering the strength to get up, fumbling hard, doing it all over again - can feel unmooring, to say the least, but, and according to DEBBY FRIDAY, its tragedies and glories need savoring. Losing illusions, gaining expectations; getting deep into the private, soupy kaleidoscope of what’s possible and what’s futile -- GOOD LUCK, her debut, and supernovic, full-length album, is built on welcoming the journey’s complicated drops and mountain highs with something more like grace.
Nigerian-born, then an emigré to bits of Canada - from Montreal to Vancouver to Toronto - DEBBY FRIDAY’s roamings through space and time really began when the sun fell. Nightlife was her emancipation from the toughness of home life, and she fell into it, body and soul, totally seduced. Raves til sunrise; house music in unknown basements and warehouses -- the lure of the party was the perfect escape. “I was like a little club rat,” she laughs. Her adoration of the world that it opened for her came in “almost in a sensual way.”
Things that feel good sometimes do fall apart, though. In 2017, after DJing for less than a year, her life just sort of imploded. Parties started getting less functional. Nothing was going the way that she wanted it to go. So she gathered her things and embarked on what would turn out to be the first of a few of her coming-of-age stories -- a wave of bildungsromans. “Personal issues: mental health stuff, substance abuse stuff, stupid love;” she lists, but the way FRIDAY says it, it seems as if she’s grateful for the valleys she had to walk through in order to see the version of herself we get today. After making the decision to stop herself in her tracks, she pulverized new paths for herself forward. Late-night YouTube tutorials on music production led to an EP, BITCHPUNK, and BITCHPUNK led to her first public performances, and all that gave way to a second EP, DEATH DRIVE. Her art endowed her with the strength she needed to move on. “This is what I was born to do,” she goes. “It came to me so naturally and instinctively. I felt just so clear, focused, and in my power in a way that I’d never felt before up until that point.”