AUSTRA - CHIN UP BUTTERCUP - DOMINO

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.” Louise Erdrich

“I’m so chaotic in love,” sings Katie Austra Stelmanis on “Amnesia,” the cinematic opening track of Chin Up Buttercup, the fifth album by her alter ego and longtime pop project Austra. You know Austra’s astonishing voice – singular and operatic, it betrays a fearlessness and sophistication. She’s the woman you’d be afraid to approach in a bar. Her voice draws you like a siren to the dance floor as the beats build toward the hypnotic chorus of “my life is not the same without you in my arms.” Listen closely and you’ll hear a vulnerability that sets this album apart from her earlier work. This is a grief album you can dance to.

Mournful lyrics about the opprobrium of heartache join euphoric, live-for-today euro-dance inspired synth melodies, a juxtaposition that says what we all know: contrasting emotions like anxiety and excitement, pleasure and pain, and jealousy and attraction can feel indistinguishable in your body. Who Stelmanis might be off stage – a composer, a studious introvert, suffering from an obsession with a romantic betrayal – is set free by embodying the protagonist of this invigorating album-length journey. She’s a force, demonic, an emotionally-driven chaos monster, and she’s going to lead you to surrender.

Heartbreak is both an ordinary humiliation and uniquely devastating. Stelmanis describes Chin Up Buttercup as a narrative about “the alienating feeling of being heartbroken in a world that’s awkward and inconvenienced by your pain.” Most of us act as though romantic grief is more of an embarrassment than a universal wound. Stelmanis decided to lean into the character of the psycho creep, consumed by longing instead of aspiring toward detachment. The result of embracing this dual personality is an album that coolly moves through the madness and eschews traditional healing arcs that bend toward self-improvement. By the final track we love this anti-hero; she is shining a light on our universal shame, making us laugh at our own abject desperation. 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.

The pandemic hit soon after the break-up, and Stelmanis had less than 24 hours to pack up a suitcase and go back to Canada alone from London, where she’d been living the three years prior. This first experience of destabilizing grief impacted her life in every way. “My self-esteem hit an all-time low,” she says, “and the initial shock eventually shifted into a sustained depression. I stopped playing music for over a year and instead turned to rage-writing every time I felt sad.” She unleashed her pain 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.

 Back in Canada she began exchanging music with the composer and producer Kieran Adams. She was floored by the experimental dance tracks he sent to her and was inspired to connect musically as a way to get out of her depressive slump. She proposed they start bi-weekly musical hangs at his partner’s aunt’s house where he was waiting out the lockdown. “They had this huge grand piano. I would go over there and we would play around without any expectations,” says Stelmanis. Neither was used to collaboration, and both felt shy about it at first. “Some people just are sessioning constantly; I was never one of those people…I needed to be in my dark cave to make my music and anybody else watching me was too humiliating. Kieran felt the same but we really pushed ourselves.” The result of this mutual drive to connect was the decision to ask Adams to co-produce the record.

Stelmanis and Adams shared a mutual love of pop divas, eurodance and hard-to-find techno. Madonna’s 1998 album Ray of Light, produced by William Orbit, was a key influence in the later stages of album making: “Ray of Light was produced almost entirely on a Juno-106 and a Korg MS-20 which we’d been using, so the reference point was aligned,” says Stelmanis. The album sounds like a mix of hypnotic dance floor anthems and elegant melodies to soothe your broken heart. In addition to “Math Equation,” two more standout tracks take Chin Up Buttercup to new heights. “Fallen Cloud" is an uplifting synth pop fantasy that recalls early 2000s new-age dance music, sweeping us through the bargaining stage of grief. “Siren Song” is a dreamy trance-like plea for connection, co-written with Montreal songwriter, musician and DJ Patrick Holland. It is one of a few co-writes on the album, including the cheerful and upbeat “Look Me in the Eye” with pop-crooner Sean Nicholas Savage. 

Chin Up Buttercup might be an ironic title pushing against simplistic solutions to profound loss, but the tracks do move through a natural progression toward the light. Now that the album is complete, Stelmanis is contemplative about what she learned along the way: “In a desperate attempt to feel better, I began to fixate on this question of what actually makes a person happy.” She observed that many of her most successful peers were lonely, in chaotic relationships, with addiction problems, most surrounded by people who only want to be close to fame. That led her to wonder if maybe her perceived shortcomings weren't really the problem: “In the wake of rejection it’s easy to feel like you aren’t good enough. But I think for a long time I was looking for validation in all the wrong places.”

Stelmanis describes herself as a recovering avoidant. Her singular ambition and drive resulted in an impressive career from a young age, but it was also closing her off to connection. And that, Stelmanis concludes, is exactly what she was missing. “I’ve always been terrible at expressing my feelings,” she says. “But after the breakup, I had to learn to do it in order to survive. I was surprised to learn that opening up actually made me feel significantly better.” It used to be important to her to project a certain kind of stoicism, but during the writing of the album she worked hard to embrace the parts of herself that had at one point felt embarrassing. Fortunately, that had some unintended positive effects: “I've gotten to a place where I believe I'm an artist of value, which even five years ago, I actually could not say.”

This is reflected on one of the last tracks on the album, a song that evokes the catharsis of coming through the worst of grief and feeling alive once again. The song begins with “I’ve done my time with you in tow, and I’m tired of feeling low,” over a slow, warm progression that moves toward a euphoric crescendo, ending with the song’s title, “the hopefulness of dawn.”