Austra, the pop project of Canadian vocalist and composer Katie Stelmanis, returns with news of her new album Chin Up Buttercup, due out November 14 via Domino.
Stelmanis, a classically trained musician and opera devotee with four previous albums and a Canadian Screen Award under her belt, has been singing dramatic arias about tragedy for years. Her secret? She didn’t really know what that devastation felt like. She only experienced it off stage in early 2020 when her long-term partner dropped a bombshell. “I was completely blindsided … the person I loved woke up one day, told me she wasn’t happy, and I basically never saw her again,” Stelmanis says. She confesses to feeling very at odds with the world, like nothing made sense. The album’s name is a reference to the societal pressure to just paste on a smile and keep going. Stelmanis and co-producer Kieran Adams took inspiration from the Eurodance sound of Madonna’s landmark 1998 album Ray of Light, produced by William Orbit, and emerged with a mix of hypnotic dance floor anthems and elegant melodies to soothe your broken heart.
Stelmanis unleashed her pain over the breakup into poetic fragments in a cathartic Google document that eventually became the source for the album’s powerful lyrics. One such example is captured vividly in the album’s first riveting single ‘Math Equation’: “You said I needed my own friends / So I found them / Then you fucked them.” There is an unmistakable type of sapphic chaos threaded through every song, and ‘Math Equation’ is equal parts catchy clapback and bittersweet plea for reconnection. ‘Math Equation’ arrives via a video directed by Trevor Blumas.
Chin Up Buttercup:
- Amnesia
- Math Equation
- Siren Song
- Chin Up Buttercup
- Fallen Cloud
- Blindsided
- Think Twice
- Look Me in the Eye
- The Hopefulness of Dawn
- Good Riddance
