After a pair of experimental synth-punk EPs, Debby Friday released her debut album Good Luck via Sub Pop in early 2023—both a continuation of her aggressive, sweaty, and just a little bit horny electro-industrial club music and a glimpse into a totally new side of the artist as heard on the softly sung pre-album single “So Hard to Tell.” With her newly released follow-up The Starrr of the Queen of Life, we get a more cohesive portrait of both this gentler version of Friday as well as the shit-talking figure who graduated out of a global noise scene, with the record’s balance of these two extremes seemingly its primary focus. “That’s always a battle—between comfort and honesty,” Friday shares of the contrast between what comes naturally versus where she wants to take the project while discussing the new record’s stark, trancy opener.
The album title’s astrological reference marks yet another contrast, this one between the skygazers of ancient Babylonia and Friday’s own present-day view of the same star, Vega. This is even her first project where she splits the production work, with Wicca Phase Springs Eternal collaborator Darcy Baylis helping to shape the record’s clubbier numbers into something both contemporary to the hyperpop canon while also nodding to the recent past in its integration of dubstep and EDM hallmarks. All of which lays the groundwork for Friday to air grievances both personal and professional, with ballads about learning to surrender to sadness landing alongside fiery indictments of the music industry—a machine she strives to crawl deeper into while remaining wary of its many evils.
With the record out today, Friday shares how everyone from Martin Buber and Simone Weil to Lady Gaga influenced these songs, while conjuring terminology like “shoegaze dancehall” to land on a shared vision with her primary collaborator on the project (she additionally brought on Holy Fuck’s Graham Walsh, Latin DJ Tayhana, and Detroit ghettotech duo Hi-Tech on for additional production contributions). Stream the album and read her track-by-track breakdown below.
1. “1/17”
I was in a really weird mental space last summer while recording the album. I was on tour, away from all my friends and missing my boyfriend, and I had a lot of sensory memories and references bouncing around in my head. Musically, it’s a totally different direction that I hadn’t explored before, and that’s always a battle—between comfort and honesty. And the honest thing for me to do was to go for it. I wanted to push myself and push the track, as well, which is why the drop comes so late. I kept telling Darcy to keep looping the middle section. It’s like the ultimate payoff, perfect delayed gratification. The trancey drop on this track was Darcy’s idea and I love it. It’s so nostalgic, yet very 2025.
2. “All I Wanna Do Is Party”
My favorite thing about “Party” is that it’s like an onion: many-layered. On the surface, it’s a hedonistic dance-pop track, but if you pay attention, it transforms into a melancholic, existential banger. When I wrote this, I was thinking a lot about the passage of time and its alternating velocities. The idea that you can be going fast and slow simultaneously and all these anxieties around “making it” as an artist, especially as a woman. There’s so much noise. So many signs. Also, sonically, I feel like this is the most Lady Gaga inspired track I’ve ever made, it’s very “Just Dance”–esque. I adore her and I respect her artistic journey a lot.
3. “In the Club” (feat. HiTech)
This is very much a Frankensteined track. It started off as two completely separate songs and a bunch of random parts. I’d recorded the verses in Detroit in late 2023 with the HiTech boys and then done some more production on it in Toronto, and then another part of it is a demo that Darcy and I had been working on earlier in the year. I remember being in the studio in London and laying it all out. I turned to Darcy and was like, “Help me”—and he freaked it! In, like, a day!!
4. “Lipsync”
“Lipsync” was born out of two things: a frustration with the state of certain aspects of the music industry and also a diss track, because someone was pissing me off. I don’t like doing the same thing over and over. I believe you should always be experimenting with your life and your art. But the way things have been set up for the past couple of years, our modes of music consumption and participation encourage both fan and artist alike to flatten themselves, to copy and paste. It’s memetic madness! And it’s so silly. Anyway, my favorite part of this track is actually the breakdown/outro. It was a kind of sonic tongue-in-cheek nod to a TikTok sound trend that I thought would be meta to utilize on a song where I’m complaining about that very thing. I don’t know how obvious that is or if it’s good satire, but it’s there.
5. “Alberta”
One day in London, Darcy and I took a walk to clear our ears and get out of the studio for a bit. We were in Hackney and a car passed by us, blasting this insane dancehall riddim. I told him I wanted to make something in that vein and during our last week in town, we ended up making “Alberta.” We’ve been calling it “shoegaze dancehall,” which I think is very fitting. It’s a sad and simultaneously hopeful track that really encompasses so much of what I believe in when it comes to loving and living. Yes, you are human and messy and deeply flawed, but I see your heart and I know that we are one and the same. It’s very Martin Buber, very I-and-Thou-ish.
6. “Higher”
I think of “Higher” as a horny, psychedelic hybrid electronic folk banger. It’s the feeling of desire so deep and so wide that it takes you to another dimension, a higher place. Sonically, I really like the sounds in this because it feels like a DJ set. There’s all these bits and pieces from a lot of different genres all brought together very deliberately. I worked on this in Mexico City with Tayhana and I feel like you can hear the heat and sunshine in it.
7. “ppp (Interlude)”
OK, so it’s not a true interlude, but it also kind of is. I consider “ppp” to be the halfway point of the album. It’s where the vibe shifts. I wrote the first verse of this two years ago as a jokey rap exercise. I don’t consider myself a rapper, but I think practicing how to rap is very useful for songwriting, so I’m always writing little rhymes in my notebooks. It keeps me playful and agile and I feel like you can hear that on this song. The title comes from, of course, the repeated motif of the song, but also it turns out to be a thing in music theory: “PPP” stands for “pianississimo,” which means to play very, very softly. And in a way, this is a very, very soft song.
8. “Arcadia”
I wrote “Arcadia” around the time that the vision of the album was starting to take shape for me. This idea of “feminine vision” and performance was very strong, it hit me like a wave. I kept seeing this mental vision of an alien woman falling to Earth like a star. I can’t say that it was a conscious decision to sing in French (it’s my second language), but once it was all said and done, it made perfect sense.
9. “Leave”
I’m a very sensitive person and I feel like I’ve only just come to terms with this in the past few years. Whenever I used to feel sad I’d automatically go to anger instead, because of how vulnerable and powerless it made me feel. But there’s beauty in surrendering to sadness, in letting it wash over you. To me, this song sounds like the moment after you’ve plunged into the water, eyes open, you’re floating in the dark, you can’t see the surface yet. There’s something very interior and opaque about a vocoder. Saddest song I’ve ever written, to be honest.
10. “Bet on Me”
I wrote this track right before heading to London, after I made the decision to be self-managed, when life was feeling so dizzy and confusing. So many things were changing around and inside of me. You really never know if you’re making the right choices, but you still have to make them, you still have to bet on yourself. I don’t gamble, but I do believe that risk always pays off.
11. “Darker the Better”
There’s something cyclical about this one to me. So much of this record is bright and airy, but we end in this post-punky shadow of sorts, back to the beginning. I love how this song functions as many metaphors: it’s about the eroticism of toxicity in relationships, but also about the push and pull of the music industry—but also about suffering as the face of God, á la Simone Weil. There’s something for everybody.
