The cover art for her new project, The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life, captures that duality. Friday appears upside down, raised high on a column—ascending and descending at once. It’s an image of tension, reflection, and reclamation. Since then, she’s parted ways with her previous management and rebuilt her life around sustainable routines and creative freedom. She calls the new record her “freedom” album.

Friday has always prided herself on being a hard worker. When asked about the biggest sign she saw on the path to this album, she returns to perseverance. Amid the chaos, she kept moving—and the universe kept showing up with just enough grace to keep her going.

“You just have this endless reserve of energy, and you don’t experience burnout in the same way,” she says of her new mindset. “When that’s the case, you’re doing work that you actually want to be doing.”

And the work she’s doing now may be her most unpredictable yet. Still rooted in experimental electronic textures, her new material veers wildly—from thumping club anthems with titles like “In the Club” and “All I Wanna Do Is Party” to chanted cheerleader-style hooks, introspective R&B, Afrobeats, and sharp-edged hip-hop. You’ll find heady historical references alongside hyper-pop party starters. For Friday, it’s all part of the same constellation.

“It’s who I am as a person – I read a lot, I have two degrees, I loved school,” she says. “But I also love dancing, and I love a really good club banger. Those things, I don’t see them as being super different, because of the way I view life and people in general. We’re all really complex and multi-layered.”

Photo: LucyMahoney

Her critiques of today’s music landscape come from the same multidimensional lens. Recently, Friday made waves online with a post lamenting how artists are increasingly being asked not to be so… artistic. She’s referring to the flattening effects of algorithm-driven content, where playlist placement and virality often take precedence over artistic depth.

“I don’t think that it’s a crime to make popular music. I think that popular music does something that’s actually very difficult to do, which is to convey really complex human emotions in a way that is accessible to everyone,” she says. “When I talk about being algorithmic, I literally mean about the way that music is consumed and also the way that it’s dispersed to people. There’s been this flattening in my opinion where people are not experiencing music as an art form, and instead it’s being consumed as content, or very one-dimensionally.”

“I feel like sitting down and looking at music has been lost in culture,” she continues. “People are not studying music in the same way. We’re not really thinking of it as a cultural art form, and I want to bring that back. I miss taking it seriously, you know? It’s not necessarily anyone’s fault, it’s just a result of these various cultural forces that have brought us here, but we can all contribute to the solution.”

That desire for deeper connection carries into her love for visuals. Friday continues to pour energy into her music videos, inspired by auteurs like Paul Verhoeven, Jonathan Glazer, Lady Gaga, and Beyoncé—particularly Lemonade, which she calls a magnum opus not just for the music, but for its visual storytelling.

All of it—the sonic shapeshifting, the mystical symbolism, the philosophical depth—is part of the world she’s building. A world that might sit somewhere just to the right of Vega if you listen close enough.

“It would be a place where people would behave differently,” she says. “I don’t think I’m misanthropic or anything; I love people, I love humanity, but we have a lot of bad habits, and we have a lot of bad behaviour. We can be very cruel to each other as human beings. On my planet, people would have a little more grace for each other. I’ll say that.”