Katie Stelmanis has spent the past decade-plus shapeshifting in plain sight. Before the mythos of Austra fully calcified, she’d already floated through art-punk outfits, lent her operatic vibrato to noise-rock provocateurs, and threaded her songwriting through electronic detours that felt both devotional and defiant. Whatever the context, her music has always orbited the same emotional core: heartbreak rendered at cathedral scale, vocals sharpened to a glint, and production that treats the dance floor like a confessional booth with a strobe light inside.
As Austra, Stelmanis has treated reinvention not as a stylistic pivot but as a kind of ritual cleansing. Future Politics funneled Trump-era dread through glassy techno grids; HiRUDiN dove headfirst into ornate, baroque synth-pop like it was oxygen. Each album felt like a recalibration of the same sonic DNA, as if Stelmanis were forever tilting the prism of her sound until a new color appeared. On Austra’s fifth LP, the sweeping and fluorescent Chin Up Buttercup, she stops rearranging the pieces and instead snaps them perfectly into place.
Her voice—bright, trembling, and unmistakably hers—has always carried a “crying in the club” undertone, but here she weaponizes it. Chin Up Buttercup is the most outwardly dance-driven Austra record yet, an album that folds countless micro-genres into its circuitry with the precision of someone who’s spent years studying how rhythm transforms sorrow. Plenty of pop artists mine the club for catharsis, but Stelmanis does it like an engineer building a machine from scratch, toggling through synth-pop strains and niche references until the emotional voltage spikes.
The lead single “Math Equation” is a thesis statement disguised as a breakup autopsy. Over pristine, frosty synths that nod toward early-’00s Scandinavian pop, Stelmanis drops the kind of opening line that could double as a plot twist: “You said I needed my own friends / So I found them / Then you fucked them.” Co-produced with Kieran Adams, the track pairs wounded clarity with a buoyant pulse—pain rendered as motion, grief refracted through melodic geometry. It becomes the blueprint for the whole record: introspection scored like a late-night dance epiphany.
The title track, barely two minutes long, feels like a dare. It enters timidly—murmured vocals, spring-loaded synths, a half-hearted pep talk to herself—before detonating into a bass drop that bulldozes the song’s nervous energy. It’s a tiny detour, a flash of maximalism, but it signals how far Austra is willing to warp her own structures to find emotional release. “Fallen Cloud,” with its disco-sparked shimmer and falsetto-layered chorus, practically levitates. She sings, “We could be absolutely perfect / If you would just change / Only a little bit,” and the beat makes this delusion sound not only reasonable but seductive.
The album’s gravitational center arrives in “The Hopefulness of Dawn,” which stretches from gauzy, reverbed vocals into a full-blown Ibiza-ready EDM bloom. Coming from any other indie artist, the pivot might read sarcastic. But Stelmanis has laid breadcrumbs the entire album—tiny pulses of euphoria threaded through every chorus—until this moment feels like an earned sunrise. It’s a rare portrayal of hope in dance-pop that doesn’t feel borrowed or theoretical. It feels embodied.
Even with its forward lurch, Chin Up Buttercup doesn’t sever ties with Austra’s lineage. Tracks like “Siren Song” and “Blindsided” echo the project’s earlier, gossamer moods, grounding the new maximalism in familiar shadows. What changes isn’t the emotional palette but the ambition: this is Stelmanis pushing her sound into a future where heartbreak and hedonism aren’t opposites but collaborators.
In the end, Chin Up Buttercup plays like a record made in the aftermath of a collapse—an artist sifting through wreckage, soldering grief into glowsticks, and refusing to let emotional devastation go to waste. It’s a reminder that reinvention isn’t just aesthetic; it’s survival. And for Austra, survival has never sounded so luminous.
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