Off Air

002: DEBBY FRIDAY

Words by Peyton Gatewood
Meet DEBBY FRIDAY, Priestess of Grime Electronica 

I play DEBBY FRIDAY on the aux when I want to induct someone into a cult--the cult of FRIDAY. No matter the track, whether it's her early computerized BITCHPUNK days or her melodic hazey singles, I always get the same reaction from those who earwitness. Who is this?? they ask me, opening Shazam. The new single “Let u in” is something different from what I know of DEBBY FRIDAY. When I saw her live at the New York venue Baby’s All Right, she was backlit by a wall of multicolored and shimmering LED lights, commanding her audience like a crazed orchestra conductor. The freshly dropped victory track calls for no gnashing teeth or headbanging, and no thumping bass lines oozing or rattling the speakers. Instead, it builds on plushier hyperpop elements lightly experimented with in Good Luck, FRIDAY’s debut studio album released earlier this year by Sub Pop Records. She leans into her ability to innovate and defy genre, different is FRIDAY’S staple: expect the unexpected! This track is the first in FRIDAY’S catalogue that isn’t produced solely by FRIDAY herself. With the help of producer and vocalist Darcy Baylis, FRIDAY’S voice is warped into a sweet pneumatic beat. Truth be told, I can’t help but hiss at the thought of someone else hammering away at the music: it’s Frankenstein’s monster, FRIDAY is Dr. Frankenstein. 

Regardless of sound specifics, when FRIDAY graces the stage, she intoxicates her audience. The music possesses her, and her signature grungey, acid-laced electronic punk electrifies the crowd. Her raw, honey-like voice coaxes them to “dance to this.” That night, her flowing box braids framed the sides of her face like a dark hood. They cascaded down her back and swished wildly as her body contorted, twisting to the rhythm like a serpent. Think Santigold meets Nine Inch Nails meets Grimes. The dance floor, once sparsely occupied, is now the best most authentic nightclub in New York City. A glimmering disco ball that crowns the back room spins on and on, illuminating a throng of bodies that seems to melt together in a bout of hypnosis. Since that fateful Wednesday in Williamsburg back in April, FRIDAY has gone on to tour Europe and Australia, win the Polaris Music Prize, and drop said victory single.



When I met with Deborah Micho before her show, she told me that DEBBY FRIDAY is not necessarily a more authentic version of herself, nor an alter ego, but an “amalgamation” of parts of her personality that aren’t always displayed in her day-to-day life— “Almost like a myth,” She says. Born to Nigerian parents who emigrated to Canada when she was very young, FRIDAY switched schools frequently. She grew accustomed to landing on her feet. When FRIDAY is on stage, she takes form, finding refuge in the ear splitting bass and table rattling industrial sound. “A next level, heightened, very potent energy comes out.” Her eyes drift somewhere else while she searches for the answers to my questions. When I ask for the story behind her stage name, she is coy. She leans back. A sweet smirk blooms across her face, “Do I have to say? It’s a secret.”

The makings of FRIDAY offered a beacon of light for a once jaded Micho, who at the time of FRIDAY’s conception, was DJing across Canada and some parts of Europe. She was navigating her early twenties and eventually, “having a nervous breakdown.” The tireless nightlife scene started to weigh on her mental health, i felt less like an escape and more like a mindless routine. Everything was going wrong. The walls of her life began to disintegrate, her structure crumbled. She decided to start fresh. She left Montreal and everything she knew behind for her mom’s basement in Vancouver. “From there, I didn't really have anything else. I knew that I loved music and that I was drawn to music. I was like, ‘Well, maybe I'll learn how to produce.” She started watching Youtube tutorials and toying with Logic, a music production software. For nine months, she resigned herself to the basement, reading up on music production and experimenting, rarely seeing anyone apart from her family. Her first EP, BITCHPUNK (2018), sprang up from intense focus and necessity. “I think it was out of a place of not having anywhere else to go and nothing else. There was nothing else for me to do. I just had to make it.” A sophomore EP, DEATH DRIVE (2019), came shortly after. “True hermit life.” She adds.

Good Luck reads like a letter of advice to the FRIDAY who made that first EP. The album chronicles her coming-of-age hero's journey with careful reflection. She emphasizes the grander scheme, the universal journey of descending into chaos, losing yourself, and finding yourself again. On the cover, she’s captured marching over a rocky stretch of arid land at nightfall, armed with chrome-white knee high platforms and a hoodie to match. Her face is eclipsed by her hood, she looks towards the horizon, a pose inadvertently reminding me of the Rider-Waite’s tarot card, The Fool, which signifies a new beginning. She strips down production for the albums' surreal pop lead single, “SO HARD TO TELL”. The first few seconds of the song are filled with distorted rhythmic blaring and a garbled warning, “They don't want your fucking autograph/ They wanna hurt you,”. Then, it bursts into a soft, dreamy loop to frame her self-scrutinizing lyrics. She asks herself if she is really happy as she is, a party girl on her own in a big city. “Is this heaven or hell?/ When it gets like this/ Oh, it's so hard to tell.”

FRIDAY’s parents played a lot of Nigerian gospel music around the house. She started rave-hopping in Montreal at 15, and at times felt stifled by her parent’s expectations and heavy emphasis on tradition. Still, she credits them for giving her context of “something beyond us.” A mystic by nature, she is curious, and has always been naturally drawn to life’s indecipherabilities. She is a big fan of psychology forefathers Jung and Freud, and incorporates their ideas of collective consciousness, egos, and shadows into her creative work. She doesn’t adhere to one religion, per say, but she is an avid student of astrology, philosophy, psychology and everything in between. “I love all of these topics because they deal with mysteries. They deal with things unknown, with secret knowledge, and things we can't see. I believe in those things.” For written works she read while “crafting her own worldview,” she points to Neville Goddard’s “At Your Command”, a metaphysical classic, and “Love in The Void,” a collection of philosophical essays written by Simone Veil. FRIDAY marches on, past the turbulent emotions of her youth, grounded in her spirituality. “I don't feel like I fear the unknown, I don't fear change. I know that these are just parts of life. That’s part of being a human being and existing. I've reconciled that.”

When she’s not making music or reading, she’s creating content for her astrology podcast and patreon, GOOD FRIDAY. “Sagittarius sun,” She tells me, sipping Red Bull through a matte black paper straw, “Gemini moon.. and I'm a Capricorn rising.”

Good Luck, which dropped in late March, goes hand-in-hand with a short film by the same name, co-directed by FRIDAY and underground film director Nathan De Paz Habib.The screenplay was written by FRIDAY alone, drawing inspiration from her experiences growing up as, in her words, a “zillenial antiheroine.” The film depicts a young girl, played by FRIDAY, who resists the sleepy confines of her school day and escapes to another world come nightfall. “I’m getting [autobiographical themes] out of my system, because I knew that if I didn't they would just be bubbling.”  FRIDAY proposes that before the birth of any new concept album, it’s important for her to be able to share her inner world, her journey, and the lessons she’s learned.

FRIDAY is, above all else, a lover. She believes the act of making music to be transcendental. To her, music is “an intricate creation of sound waves laced together to produce melody and rhythm, undetectable to the human eye, but felt in the body.” In an essay written while pursuing her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Simon Fraiser University, she expands on Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic. “The Erotic” is defined by Lorde as a sense of togetherness found in “the body, desire, love and the spiritual.” FRIDAY cites her own music, exploring the potential for electronic punk to “fill the space between you and I.”  She is energized by the connection she makes with her audience, by the collection of individual souls blurring together, rocking to one beat. “it's like I give to them, and they give to me, and we have this symbiosis. To make people feel something and it goes back and forth, back and forth. It feels like it's the way it's supposed to be.”

FRIDAY has made a tradition out of flinging herself into the audience near the end of every set. For “PLUTO BABY,” she leaps into the crowd. The lights are a rich, royal purple, a stark contrast to her white baby tee and metallic stiletto boots. I can barely see anything else. She throws her head back and forth as she raps in a dry, hushed whisper. She delivers them like she's sharpening a knife, and in the faces of various front row audience members. They join in on the percussive headbanging, the bacchanalia. It’s a contagion.