Canadian artist Housewife (Brighid Fry) has released her new EP ‘Girl Of The Hour‘ through Submarine Cat Records, accompanied by the hooky and bittersweet new single ‘Matilda‘.
Rooted in personal loss and universal grief, the lead offering ‘Matilda‘ is a song that transforms a seemingly simple event into a deeply emotional allegory. Inspired by the theft of her beloved bike, affectionately nicknamed Matilda, Housewife channels the bittersweet feeling of missing something that once brought freedom and joy.
Reflecting on the song’s meaning, she shares, “Matilda was inspired by my bike getting stolen a couple years ago. I was an avid cyclist for years and really loved that bike (and had nicknamed it Matilda). I remember a while after it got stolen, I was out on a day that was perfect biking weather and just getting hit with how much I miss cycling. Obviously, the song isn’t just about a bike, but also an allegory for grief and loss, and missing something or someone you can’t have anymore. I think everyone, cyclists or not, can relate to that grief, and the struggle of moving on from things in their past, as I still haven’t replaced the bike to this day.”
‘Girl Of The Hour‘ follows the 2022 EP ‘You’ll Be Forgiven‘ continuing the sprawling indie-pop energy Housewife has become known for.
Filled with curiosity and questions of identity, Toronto’s Brighid Fry (she/they) makes the sort of 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 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.
Still only 22, 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, Brighid 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.
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 bisexuality since the age of 12. 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.
