Bria Salmena, Photo: Matthew Tammaro.

While Toronto-area native Bria Salmena partnered with several friends—some of whom she’s been making music with for years—for her new album, she describes the finished work, Big Dog, as her most personal.

She was the singer in Toronto post-punk quartet FRIGS, all of whom became Orville Peck’s backing band as he pursued country music around 2018. They came up in the same Toronto music scene, he needed a band, and they volunteered.

“We were just a bunch of punks cosplaying as cowboys. That’s how it started,” she says from her home in Los Angeles, where she moved in 2022 to be closer to “OP’s” home base. “I’ve always been into country music. I was playing in folk bands in my early twenties.”

She and bandmate Duncan Hay Jennings then pursued the country theme—but while messing with the aesthetic—with two EPs of country tune renditions that cover ground between ethereal dream-pop and coldwave rather than twangy Americana.

The duo released those EPs, slyly titled Cuntry Covers, volumes one and two, as Bria. That process of turning country songs on their heads informed the music-making process of Big Dog. But while all their work has been and remains highly collaborative, Salmena says what makes the new record right to release under her full name—for the first time—is that she wrote the songs fully with her own voice and from her personal experience.

“It feels like some of the truest original music I’ve done,” she says. “[With FRIGS], we split everything equally. … It would always kind of like start from jams or something like that. … FRIGS are sitting on so much unreleased material that it doesn’t really feel necessary to make more FRIGS music. That band is currently inactive. It felt like time, after Cuntry Covers, for Duncan and I to venture out. We wanted to do something different, and I wanted to do my own thing.”

Big Dog is a raw album that puts Salmena’s voice, in all its richness, front and center. Covering about four years that included a pandemic, “all sorts of shitty relationships with shitty people” and her relocation to L.A., she growls, warbles, rasps and sometimes sweetly sings about getting pummeled into the ground by life before persevering and finding her way out. The title came from a pep talk she got to lift her spirits.

“My life changed a lot in that four years. … There was just a lot of interpersonal things that were going on,” she says. “It feels like you just keep getting hit by things one after another, and eventually, it’s kind of like pounding you into the ground … feeling like you’re constantly getting shoved into this pit. And each time something else happens, it gets harder and harder to get out of it—but you eventually do get out of it.

“A lot of the songs—all the songs—on this record are kind of an exploration of whatever I was going through at the time. The catharsis of writing these songs, I think, was a part of getting me out of said pit. … Everybody goes through stuff. That is not uniquely me. … Perseverance of knowing that nothing is permanent—we all exist in some sort of temporary state constantly—that felt very reassuring.”

Her friend and U.S. Girls member Meg Remy was instrumental in helping bring out her voice as its own music instrument, she explains. It takes on many different textures on the album, from sweet and smooth to abrasive.

Bria says she wanted to challenge herself by writing in voicings with which she wasn’t comfortable. She ended up writing several songs in lower keys, some of which proved difficult to recreate on stage.

“As I’m writing them, I’m usually at home, and I’m not projecting, or I’m not quite singing as you would live, or on a record,” she says. “‘Hammer’ is an example. Live, we’ve had to move it up because I just like wrote it too low. … It became kind of like a challenge in the studio to sing that low.”

Remy pushed her to focus on vocals in a way she hadn’t before. Each song took on its own character. Some of her direction was technical, but more so, Remy encouraged Salmena to think about the stories she wanted to get across and how she wanted to express them. The two women listened to a lot of other artists’ music, picking out things they liked.

Remy got Salmena to put herself in specific places at the time of the recordings, with the understanding that once a recording was cut, it was a permanent document of her experiences.

“It made me really think about exactly what I wanted to do … and could put myself in those moments where I needed to,” she says.

“Some songs needed a kind of a different version of myself. A song that comes to mind is ‘Radisson,’ ‘cause … to me that is kind of an outlier on the record …and it’s very cinematic, lyrically. I wanted it to feel like a third person was singing it, not necessarily like myself, who was in the story. So, trying to maybe not be as raspy. Taking myself out of that.

“There was a lot of vocal experimentation. With the song ‘See’er,’ and even ‘Twilight.’ There’s a lot of stuff mixed in there that’s textured, that’s just me with a mic. The idea was to use the voice as part instrumentation.”

The instrumentation, started on her acoustic guitar, is just as varied in the hands of Jennings and producer Graham Walsh (Holy Fuck, METZ, Alvvays—and FRIGS), blending elements of guitar rock with electronic textures. Other key contributions include Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo on the slowly trickling, psychedelic “See’er,” which recalls the work of another famous Canadian, Daniel Lanois. While the two pursued that direction on the covers EPs, those ideas feel fully realized on the album.

“Cuntry Covers, for Duncan and I, was like a sonic exploration of trying to find a sound that we felt could be uniquely ours,” Salmena says. “Outside of songwriting, we wanted to find a production style that we could transfer over into … writing original material. [It’s] us figuring it out. I think we’re constantly evolving and trying things. Duncan and I are very down for that. With Cuntry Covers Vol. 2, it felt like we had kind of landed on something that we were really excited about.”

Contact editor Roman Gokhman on Bluesky at roman.riffmagazine.com.