Debby Friday

Most autobiographical albums are formed, informed, and deformed by memories sometimes sweet, but, more often bitter, where recriminations and retribution lace every drop of delivery, every utterance a vanquishing ooze of hurt and pain.

For Nigeria-cum-Canada artiste DEBBY FRIDAY, however, a period of breaking-up and breaking-down resulted in the equation-creation ‘heart-ache and eventual heart-make equals art-make’. CREATION is an anagram of REACTION after all.

For DEBBY FRIDAY advertising and expressing yourself in CAPITAL LETTERS is a statement of intent, an understatement of discontent, a resolute restatement of content which commands and demands that YOU will PAY ATTENTION.

FRIDAY sings in capital letters, upfront, BOLD, BRAVE and BACK with a BANG. Her renewal has come through a series of MYSTIC explorations, CREATIVE predestinations, tapping into the dark abyss within to unleash the inner LIGHT that banishes the unwanted shadows, the traces that remain are the true silhouettes. The grey areas of twilight and moonlight meet in a MATRIX of MAGIC.

A gainful>painful process of KNOW THYSELF to UNDERSTAND OTHERS. Texturally the album veers from PUNK-polemics, INDUSTRIAL clatter-chatter, skewed bubbleglum POP, bliss-tering BEATS, beeps and bloops, fault-line ROCK, RAVE disorder and dimly-lit strip-HOP and dropped HIPS. Sometimes ALL at the SAME time.

Building on earlier EPS BITCHPUNK and DEATH DRIVE, opener, the titular GOOD LUCK is pure electro-dub-disco, DARK, DEEP and DENSE, a self-addressed mantra to girl FRIDAY and self-confessed ‘club rat’ and a sonic reminder of her past, one full of excess and endless times when the sun would set the parties would get ... started.

I GOT IT and HOT LOVE are all devilish dancefloor warp and weft, a place where acid house torque meets rapid heft. Head-spinning surrounds abound, body-convulsing beats astound as FRIDAY - accompanied by Chris Vargas of Pelada / Uñas on the former – brings ECSTATIC EMANCIPATION to the fore. The latter echoes Boy Harsher’s cavernous clarion calls and karmic kiss-offs, faded FLIRTATIONS turned to frozen FRUSTRATIONS.

The outlier is SO HARD TO TELL, as close to a radio-friendly unit-shifter as FRIDAY is prepared to VENTURE. For now.

DEBBY FRIDAY asks, no, INSISTS that you follow her lead EVERYDAY of the year.