Debby Friday is announcing The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life, her kaleidoscopic new album out Friday, August 1st, 2025, worldwide from Sub Pop and in Canada from Royal Mountain Records.
In ancient Babylonia, stargazers looked up at the cloudless night sky and saw a blazing ball of light. Burning brilliantly, the celestial body appeared to be a luminous sign from the great beyond. They were looking at what we now call Vega, the fifth-brightest star visible from Earth. Debby Friday was learning about these heavenly bodies in between nonstop touring across Europe, following the otherworldly success of her thunderous debut album GOOD LUCK, which dominated dance floors and took home the auspiciously astrological Polaris Prize upon its release in 2023. She learned about Vega and the way its placement in a birth chart lends the gifts of creativity, acclaim and bravery—as long as its recipient is humble enough to receive them.
On The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life, Debby Friday defines success on her own terms. “I want to be a starrr, I can’t hide that desire,” she says. “But what I don’t want is to live someone else’s dream or to follow a pre-set path.” For the Nigerian-Canadian polymath, to be a starrr is to live at the extremes: public versus private, hubris versus humility, flying versus falling.
Part of being a starrr means embracing the apocalyptic hedonism of an all-night rave — like on the album’s epic pre-release single, “1/17,” and today’s new offering, the explosive dance pop anthem “All I Wanna Do Is Party.”
Co-directed with frequent collaborator Kevan Funk, Debby Friday stars alongside a troupe of dancers in the official “All I Wanna Do Is Party” video. Of the video, she has this to say, “The video is really about discipline and craft. It’s about the transformations that happen when you devote yourself to a process over time. The starrr is a metaphor for all these thoughts I have around fame, success, failure, love, power, god, death, life, everything. My starrr is in me, and your starrr is in you, and it’s just a matter of surrendering to it.”
Winning the Polaris Prize for GOOD LUCK only made Debby Friday want to grind harder. But life on the razor’s edge can only be sustainable for so long: During a nonstop tour schedule in support of the album, she fell violently ill. The diagnosis? Stress-induced shingles. That experience forced Friday to turn her focus inward. The next year saw a change in management, in her routine, and priorities.
To help bring her vision of radical honesty on the dance floor to life, Friday recruited Australian producer Darcy Baylis (Wicca Phase Springs Eternal). Returning to their de facto home base in London in between touring, the pair traded ideas in the studio from morning until midnight. Layered with meaning, The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life is brimming with coded, if-you-know-you-know references—weaving love letters and innuendos from the names of it-girl perfumes, French cognac, and Hellenistic prophetesses who speak in tongues. With additional production credits from Graham Walsh (METZ, Holy F*ck), Tayhana (Rosalia, N.A.A.F.I.) and Detroit ghettotech prodigies HiTech, it reads like a manifestation of Friday’s pursuit of an experimental pop sound that still feels distinctively hers.
“This album is about the idea of reaching towards something,” she says. “It’s about seeing the signs and following that impulse, always with the potential of either flying into the sun or falling back to earth.” On The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life, Debby Friday takes flight, fastening her wings, following the sound of her own voice (Read full bio at Sub Pop).
The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life is available to preorder from Sub Pop and Royal Mountain. LP preorders from megamart.subpop.com in the US, MegaMart 2 in the UK and EU, Royal Mountain in Canada and your local record store will receive the following limited color vinyl versions: the Sub Pop Loser editions on Graphite (US) and Bio Light Blue (EU/UK), and Royal Mountain’s edition on White (Canada) (All vinyl colors whilst stock lasts!).
Debby Friday has scheduled two performances for the Spring and Summer of 2025: Thursday, May 15th in Brighton, UK at The Great Escape Festival and Sunday, August 3rd in Montreal at Osheaga Festival—additional live dates to be announced soon.