Bria Salmena won’t let Canada be overlooked

“I have so much pride in Canadian DIY,” Salmena tells me, speaking passionately about the DIY ecosystem from which her first band, FRIGS, emerged and which continues to inform her work. “We’re top drawer, but we kind of get overlooked.”

It’s via these nurturing scenes that Salmena became a revered artist who has covered a lot of ground over a relatively brief time period. Whether she’s putting out an album like 2018’s widely lauded Basic Behaviour with her frenetic post-punk band FRIGS or playing with alt-country icon Orville Peck, Toronto has been the centre of her musical universe, as it has for her long-time collaborator Duncan Hay-Jennings. However, based in LA since the pandemic, she and her modus operandi have had to adapt.

Salmena’s new album, Big Dog, belies the sonic expectations established by her previous records. Cinematic and atmospheric, it places Salmena’s soulful, characterful voice at its centre. There are shades of Kosmische music and the spirit of Hole and Sonic Youth records that soundtracked Salmena’s formative years (indeed, Lee Ranaldo plays guitar on “See’er”!). Big Dog is a modern, idiosyncratic pop record that assimilates its influences beautifully and tastefully – and, unsurprisingly for a record of such creative scope, it percolated over a protracted development period.

“‘Water Memory’” is the earliest song on there – that’s from 2020,” Salmena tells me. “Duncan and I were just writing and writing and writing. We didn’t necessarily have a view to making a record initially. We’d also been working on the Cuntry Covers project [2021’s take on 20th century standards], and doing cover versions allowed us a little more space to explore experimentation with our production techniques and instrumentation. Having that really informed the sound and the shape of this record, which we’d always intended to be original music.”

Out of pandemic-shaped ennui emerged a fully fledged artistic project: essentially four or five years of consistent writing, picking at thematic threads until the reality of a record started to emerge. Living together at the time, Salmena and Hay-Jennings had the time and space to utilise their home studio, unburdened by pressures of time or the expectations of others, an experience Salmena describes as “exciting and scary.”

The pair set out to unearth a sound that was “uniquely theirs” – not dictated by any music they had made previously, and relating to the unique and vulnerable context in which they found themselves. What began as a process of play became a powerful, soul-searching experience – with a succession of enlivening moments. “A real eureka moment in sounds was when ‘Closer To You’ came,” Salmena recalls with palpable joy. “That encompassed this journey that we’d been on, and we felt like we’d found that pot of gold, so to speak. We applied to the other songs what we applied to that.”

This process allowed Salmena to write more vulnerably than ever, and to allow her life to revolve around these processes “The access was easy. Writing and recording kind of became the same process, which was really exciting.” Salmena summarises the emotional thread of the record as her processes of getting herself to a better place and dealing with the weight of emotional baggage that the pandemic brought into sharp focus. In spite of the heaviness of the inspiration, Salmena’s writing is directly impressionistic and leaves just the right amount to the imagination. In her own words, she’s always preferred a “freakier” style of writing.

“Some songs aren’t necessarily as personal as others. I wanted to write vulnerably and honestly while kind of remaining in the ether – I never want to be too obvious. But this is ultimately about me being in a state of flux, about heartbreak and movement.”

The record reflects this in both a sonic and a thematic way. The Neu!-informed pulse of songs such as “Drastic”, married to a consistent reference to place, transport the listener, and movement means the record zips past like a train – vibrating with energy to natural points of entropy, like the gorgeous, dejected closer “Peanut”. Irrespective of how beautifully the whole record hangs together, Salmena admits that, for both herself and Hay-Jennings, gut-feeling dictated direction.

“When we decided on the groupings of songs, it was more about a feeling rather than an obvious thematic thread. At that point we didn’t even know what the record was going to be called – we didn’t know what we were doing,” Salmena shares.

Happily, the record has clearly stimulated a sense of momentum, and Salmena and Hay-Jennings have been writing consistently since the completion of Big Dog, despite now being separated by two-and-a-half-thousand miles (Salmena in LA, Hay-Jennings in Toronto). For both, writing and production have become similar processes, with the distance dictating that they now write remotely. From “playing songs over and over again on guitar so I didn’t forget them” to “recording everything for fear of forgetting,” Salmena reflects on the ways that her artistic practice has changed.

“The way we work now, it’s like receiving a package in the mail every once in a while – you get excited about it in the same way,” she says. “We’d talk so much about the intention of it. I would send him shit – I wouldn’t be sure if it was good or not – but every time he would send it back, 99% of the time it would feel true to whatever it was I was feeling. We’re really lucky like that. Of course there are instances where something isn’t working, but we’re both completely open to everything and we allow ourselves space and time. As long as it’s organic to us.”

No matter how much her sound and process evolves, Salmena remains effusively protective of the scenes that birthed her creative practice. The record is peppered with influence from Toronto musicians – including Graham Walsh, the producer who’s worked with Alvvays and METZ, and Meg Remy, vocalist for Toronto-based band U.S. Girls, who coached Salmena on her cathartic vocal performances. As Salmena puts it in a scream-from-the-rooftops moment: “It’s important to us that the record was Canadian!”