Austra, the pop project of Canadian vocalist and composer Katie Stelmanis, returns today with her new album ‘Chin Up Buttercup’.

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. 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.” She confesses to feeling very at odds with the world, like nothing made sense. The album’s name is a reference to societal pressure to just paste on a smile and keep going.

‘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. 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.”

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.