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.

Recent singles “Life Of The Party”, “Wasn’t You”, “I Lied”, “King Of Wands” and “Fuck Around Phase” have picked up support from outlets across the globe, from CBC in Canada to BBC Radio 1 and BBC 6 Music in the UK.