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.

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.

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.”

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.”