Housewife
Housewife - 'Girl Of The Hour' EP bio
Filled with curiosity and questions of identity, Toronto’s Brighid Fry (she/ they) makes the sort of
indie-leaning, exploratory music that it’s taken several years of early success and subsequent
growth to reach. First breaking through in her teens as one half of Moscow Apartment, the duo
swiftly won a Canadian Folk Music award for their self-titled debut EP before changing their
name and then becoming a solo project in 2022. As Brighid hit her twenties and stepped front
and centre, the material that she was writing became increasingly more self-aware and
personal, too.
“In Moscow Apartment we were writing songs about like, ‘plants’ and ‘a dream I had about a
canoe’,” Brighid laughs, “whereas now I’m writing stuff that deals with gender and sexuality.
Housewife is a name that puts some people on edge, so it felt more fitting in that sense.”
Still only 21, Brighid credits her liberal upbringing as helping to make this process of both artistic
and self-discovery as seamless as possible. Having recently been diagnosed as autistic, she
jokes that her neurodivergence was on display and understood from the first moments music
entered her life as a child when, unlike most three-year-olds, she became obsessed with
classical composers and begged her parents not just for a kid’s violin, but also a collection of
busts of Bach, Beethoven and co. When the classical music fixation gave way to more
contemporary tastes, she would join her family at the folk festivals they regularly attended,
playing her first non-classical performance at a Greenpeace fundraiser.
“I got really obsessed with Joni Mitchell and covered her song ‘Circle Game’,” she recalls of that
formative moment. “My mum’s such a big folkie; my bio dad is very alternative and would get me
into metal, and my stepdad has an old-school crust punk thing going on so I had these very
different influences.”
As well as offering Brighid an early introduction to the community that music can provide and the
climate activism that would go on to become a big part of her life (in 2021, she helped to set up
the Canadian branch of Music Declares Emergency), her family also provided a completely
accepting place to explore her wider identity. As a “third generation queer”, she’s felt confident
and comfortable with her own bisexuality since the age of 12. “My parents are bisexual; my
grandma’s a lesbian; I grew up going to Pride so I never had a teary coming out,” she notes. In
the two years since Housewife’s previous EP ‘You’ll Be Forgiven’, meanwhile, Brighid has spent
time understanding that she is non-binary. “It took longer to figure that bit out, but I’ve never
struggled with my identity,” she says.
On new EP ‘Girl Of The Hour’, then, Housewife is addressing these facets more than ever - be
that on the friend crush dilemma of first single ‘I Lied’ or the musings on social perceptions that
run through ‘Life of the Party’. But although these six tracks of earworm grunge-pop are a real
time document of an artist growing and changing - figuring out some vital parts of themself
along the way - the predominant vibe is one that’s playful and inquisitive. “Sometimes your
friends are hot and that can get more complicated when there are no hard lines on what you
are,” Brighid suggests. “That’s how my queerness ends up coming out in my music.”
‘Wasn’t You’ laces fuzzy guitars with a relatable tale about fancying someone you wish you
didn’t. “My problem with being bisexual isn’t about being attracted to women, it’s being attracted
to men,” Brighid laughs - an idea intertwined with an acute awareness of the gender imbalance
of prospective partners who “have been raised and socialised in a completely different way than
me, and don’t have to deal with sexism and misogyny in the same way I do.”
On the aforementioned ‘I Lied’, she addresses another hurdle of being bisexual over the sort of
buoyant indie-pop that nods to fellow queer heroes MUNA. “I’m always interested in this idea
that straight men and women can’t be friends, or that you can’t be friends with someone you
could be attracted to,” Brighid notes, “because if you’re bi then well, shit! Can’t I have any
friends?!” Meanwhile, for the melancholy heartbreak of ‘Divorce’, Brighid sought out fellow
songwriter Hank Compton during a writing session in order to make “the most devastating shit”
they could.
Largely moving away from the lighter folk of her early output and leaning into the more
alternative influences that have been part of her life since attending a formative Girls Rock camp
aged eight, ‘Life of the Party’ fuses pop hooks with a grungey, cathartic musicality; a duality that
fits the song perfectly. “People don’t pick up on the fact that I’m autistic automatically so they’ll
think I'm this aloof, weird bitch,” Brighid says. “But then people also assume I’m this confident
person who knows what they’re doing [because of my career]. I wanted to write a song about all
these misconceptions about me and how hard it is to set people straight. People see me on
stage and think that’s me, but it just never has been.”
‘Matilda’ is a song about losing her bike that’s also, of course, not just about losing her bike. “It’s
about the aspect of needing to move on and dealing with loss that was informed by this other
big loss in my life. But,” she notes, “I genuinely cried when I lost that bike.” Meanwhile ‘Work
Song’ - written with regular collaborator and Juno award winner, Derek Hoffman - takes an
upbeat, glass-half-full approach to self improvement, morphing dissatisfaction into a pop about
getting better, both as a performer and a person.
On ‘Girl Of The Hour’, Brighid is fully leaning into the fresh territory she’s opened up as
Housewife - from the newly limitless genre scope she’s allowing herself to explore to the
increasingly personal, nuanced and curious topics that permeate the lyrics within them. More
than ever, Brighid Fry knows herself and the result is a project that’s getting more confident in
the idiosyncrasies of its own skin by the day. “Some people say that this music is political or it
has very strong messaging and I think that’s great,” she says, “but really for me, it’s just a way to
process life.”
