Austra - Chin Up Buttercup
Pink Fizz / Domino
Released on November 14th, 2025
Over five years after her last release, pop musician and producer Katie Stelmanis returns with a new Austra record: Chin Up Buttercup. Since she became active as Austra in 2009, Stelmanis has released several albums including Feel It Break (2011), Olympia (2013), Future Politics (2017), and Hirudin (2020) along with a composed score for the documentary feature and docu-series SWAN SONG (2023). Her debut album was shortlisted for the 2011 Polaris Music Award and it was received with critical acclaim which raised her name to prominence.
There is a cerebral quality to Austra’s music. For one, Katie Stelmanis is classically trained with an affinity for opera which shows up in her adept music composition, which gained her recognition with a Canadian Screen Award under her belt for her work in SWAN SONG. But also Stelmanis has cultivated her conceptual edge by turning to philosophy, specifically she is aligned with the broad umbrella of thought labelled “accelerationism” found in works of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams such as The Accelerationist Manifesto and Inventing The Future: Post-Capitalism in a World Without Work.
“Accelerationism” is a term surrounded by much misunderstanding often attributed to those who have claimed the term in the name of white supremecist acts of violence. This may certainly tie to accelerationisms such as r/accelerationism and neoreaction, but they don’t captivate the wide net of these philosophies and practices informed by technoscience and cybernetics. In Austra’s case, she put herself in dialogue in her album Future Politics with the left-wing of accelerationisms to contend with the close horizon of political imaginations rendering the future obsolete in a manner akin to Mark Fisher’s diagnosis of the problem. Like Srnicek and Williams (but other accelerationists like Reza Negarestani), Austra highlights the co-optation of transgressions and forms of resistance while also noting that the emancipatory potentials of technology are smothered under its integration to capitalism. Thus, Future Politics reflects Austra’s conceptual cutting edge and political ambitions in terms of making a future even if it is through technological poetics in her music.
By way of contrast, Chin Up Buttercup is a rather intimate album. In her attunement to the dramatic nature of opera, Austra has described herself as someone performing “arias about tragedy for years.” However, the crux of Chin Up Buttercup rests in that she was thoroughly devastated by heartbreak upon learning that her long-term partner left her. The break marked by this event distinguishes her work dramatizing tragedy from what followed after her own heartache and grief. Up front, the title contrasts the state of disorientation that disturbed her after the break up with the compulsory injunction to positivity in contemporary society. All of this tension gets distilled into dance floor music and emotive elegies by Stelmanis and her co-producer Kieran Adams (Diana, The Weather Station).
The album kicks off with “Amnesia,” a track which blends the elements from this underlying tension by starting out with a mournful piano-led track leading up to dance pop anthem that draws influence from Madonna’s iconic track “Ray of Light.” Although lyrically sparse, Austra’s operatic singing of the main refrain “My life is not the same without you in my arms” is evocative of grief through and through. This is followed by the single “Math Equation,” a song that instrumentally reminds me of Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You out of My Head” — but sadder. Austra cuts through the track with the initial lyrics: “You said I needed my own friends / So I found them, then you fucked them.” Immediately, Austra launches into mathematical world play playing out the romantic disarray as an attempt to make sense of things, to find a logic to her predicament, and square the circles so to speak. Cleverly so, she describes her own subtraction from the equation while alluding to a triangular disturbance to the couple, which is truly an iconic poetic technique traced back all the way to Sappho as per Anne Carson’s commentary on her fragments. The following single “Siren Song” lyrically plays on such literary allusions over an atmospheric electro track that allows Austra vocals to shine. At this point, it should become apparent that each song is as catchy as the last.
Then comes the titular track which starts off with a disjointed play of instruments and transformed vocals. “Chin Up Buttercup” progresses into a song mimicking the tune of children’s musicals only to an enveloping industrial sound that breaks apart the song. The last of the singles comes up next. “Fallen Cloud” delves into the impulse to try to change another so that they can fit into our perfect picture of love. The hypnotic track and vocals create a layered airy atmosphere of melodies grounded by the steady electro pop beat. Eventually this teethers into a lush ambient without a beat that lets the song come to a rest. “Blindsided” provides an emotionally heartbreak depiction of the break up’s scene. The song is very descriptive for the verses, but the chorus introduces an emotional supplication as a plea for a former lover to stay but also as a baffled search for the signs missed along the way. As the track builds up the refrain “To give you my love and more,” Austra performs some beautifully lush harmonies accompanied by quiet arpeggio that bolster the emotional cut felt throughout her words. This all the more strongly felt by the end of the track where all these elements come to a head as she sings “This is the way it goes,” perhaps making this my favorite track in the album alongside with the first three tracks.
The tune shifts at this point in the album into a far more upbeat track with “Think Twice.” Instrumentally, it reminds me at times of Devours’ music with the bleep blooping melodies shaping the track. Nonetheless, there is an almost bedroom pop form to the track in its sparse mix and vocal performance that give it a sense of playfulness. This is all in contrast to the subject matter of the track, which concerns the aftermath and consequences of the break up. “Look Me in the Eye” shifts this upbeat energy into a softer track about how long it takes to actually move on, all the self-admitted playing dumb and hanging on to faint possibilities for another chance. This track might be one to check out for fans of early Caroline Polachek in Pang, since it at least reminded me of “Pang” and “Look At Me Now” from that album. In fact, I will say that Caroline Polachek is something that I feel channeled through Austra’s own way of doing evocative and dynamic vocal performances.
Towards the end of the album, “The Hopefulness of Dawn” comes in as the longest take in the album, but for very good reasons. Storytelling through music seems to me as a corner store of how this song works. It moves from the oceanic sense of loss in the drowned out vocals and atmosphere over to a dawning moment that clears the way for an astonishing electropop track. It is as if Austra let herself and her loss go into a brighter elsewhere when she sings “I see colour in the sky / It’s brighter now, than you and I.” The movements feel so natural and evocative, which makes one of the most ambitious tracks in the album into one of the notable highlights to be listened to. This leads us to the album’s conclusion with “Good Riddance” which corroborates that sense of transition whereby now Austra looks back at all the nothing she left behind. The confessional ending feels resolute in its bittersweet realizations crescending into an atmospheric peak where Austra’s voice becomes one with the instrumental atmosphere.
While Austra has certainly proven to make excellent music across the board, Chin Up Buttercup taps on an element of her music that makes this album so special: her intimate emotionality and vulnerability. I described Austra as cerebral earlier in this review, and I find that this aptly describes a lot of what her work has achieved prior to this album. In no uncertain terms, she is smart about her music and her work. Now, what Chin Up Buttercup shows about her is that she doesn’t just have a brain that polishes good music, but a heart that is letting its cracks be felt through this musical craft. Austra has humanely carried her grief and vulnerability into music to give them their proper dignity as a universal wound that the compulsory world of positivity tries to deny into shame.
