Bria Salmena

Bria Salmena’s debut solo album Big Dog chronicles a story of transformation–a deeply personal exploration of resilience and a declaration of artistic independence forged through collaboration. Long celebrated as the frontwoman of Canadian post-punk outfit FRIGS and as a vocalist in Orville Peck’s live band, Salmena culminates her artistic evolution on Big Dog. Anchored by her commanding voice—alternately tender, raw, and defiant—the album traverses the terrain of vulnerability and connection, marking the arrival of an artist boldly coming into her own.

A few years ago, Salmena was at a low point in life when a friend affectionately called her “big dog” during a pep talk. Though just a throwaway term meant to lift her spirits, the phrase struck a chord. When searching for a way to sum up the collection of songs that saw Salmena digging herself out of such a dark period, the answer was obvious; the term perfectly embodied her journey from the murky depths of despondency and self-sabotage towards a complete artistic and personal transformation.

Big Dog is a record of big emotions and big ambitions. Musically, the record takes elements of hypnotic krautrock and shimmery shoegaze, opulent goth and pulsing darkwave, with a smearing of electronic textures for a sophisticated and often uncanny sound. Amidst this vast sonic landscape, Salmena’s potent lyrical imagery and gorgeous vocals stand dead center, perfectly in focus.

For Salmena, it is impossible to unlink the personal journey represented by Big Dog from the collaborative relationships that went into its creation. Though the record is being released under her full name, “none of this would have been encouraged or possible without the support from my community,” she says.

A long time participant in independent music, Salmena started her career as frontwoman for critically-acclaimed Canadian post-punk band FRIGS; most recently she was a vocalist in Orville Peck’s live band. In both these projects, she worked with producer and multi-instrumentalist Duncan Hay Jennings, who is not only Salmena’s closest creative collaborator but also her closest friend. Their longstanding artistic relationship is defined by a “sensitivity to each other’s process and a shared vision—a lot of [Big Dog] is my experiences, but we’ve shared a lot of them,” she says. Prior to Big Dog, the two gave classic and modern Americana songs a goth-y dream pop treatment on both of Salmena’s Cuntry Covers EPs.

Salmena and Jennings, who were living in Los Angeles and Toronto, respectively, wrote Big Dog over the course of several years. As they worked, it became apparent that Salmena’s songwriting had taken a raw and intimate turn, which began to affect the writing process—in a good way. “We went deep,” says Jennings. “We had some in-person writing sessions that were pretty heavy and affected the making of the record, as well, because there were a lot of elements recorded in those moments that we really wanted to keep when we moved into the studio.”

When Salmena and Jennings were ready to bring outside people into the process, they were intentional in their choices. Graham Walsh (Holy F**k, METZ, Debby Friday, Alvvays) helped the pair further refine their budding mix of rock and electronic music, while Meg Remy (of critically acclaimed experimental pop project U.S. Girls) focused primarily on Salmena’s vocals. Remy helped coax out the unforgettable performances that lie at the center of Big Dog through a series of cathartic meetings, pushing Salmena to dig even more deeply into the meaning of her lyrics and really think about different ways of using her voice, the instrument Salmena calls “my bread and butter.”

Big Dog’s sound hovers between two worlds, gritty punk honesty always simmering below gleaming atmospherics, impossible to ignore. Is this pop music roughed up by a rock sensibility or rock emboldened by pop’s sense of scale? It’s both. There are alternative rock touchstones—you’ll hear Live Through This, you’ll hear The Distillers, both of whom were formative for a teenage Salmena—and one genuine alternative rock icon in Lee Ranaldo, who contributes guitar to “See’er.” But there’s also a sleekness that’s just as much a callback to ‘80s coldwave as it is to ecstatic forms of dance music. The split effect can be eerie, as on the clanging “Rags,” a song that seems to groan and shimmer. It can be soothing as on the fractured pop song “Hammer,” Big Dog’s one true love song. Or it can be both at the same time as on the Mazzy Star-esque “Twilight,” the oldest song on the record and one that features a stripped back sound foregrounding its sense of naivety and surrender.

At the center of everything is Salmena’s rich voice, a constant warm glow within a mesh of mechanical sounds. It’s ever-present and impossible to ignore, whether Salmena is angelically harmonizing with herself, murmuring in her lowest registers, or pushing herself into an uncomfortable falsetto and staying there. “I just need it, need it, need it,” she repeats on “Stretch the Struggle,” a song about being suspended in that anguished moment between realizing something needs to go and actually letting it go, her voice slowly becoming subsumed in pulsing electronic beats and bubbling synths.

At its core, Big Dog is more than just a record about discovering who you are through the processing of painful experience. It’s a record about discovering that you are never really alone. In many ways, Big Dog’s entire existence is a testament to the bravery it takes to be vulnerable, to open up to people, to trust yourself, and know that what you feel matters—to step into your power both as an individual and part of a greater whole. To Salmena, this is what it means to be a big dog. “No artist is an island,” she says. “I would not have been able to find the resolve that is Big Dog as a record or concept or feeling I have about myself without the community around me.”