Austra, the pop project of vocalist and composer Katie Stelmanis, returns 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. 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 (Diana, The Weather Station) 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. 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.
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Jane Inc. is the solo moniker of Carlyn Bezic, forged after years spent building bona fides in the Toronto music scene with groups like U.S. Girls, Darlene Shrugg and dance-pop duo Ice Cream. An “all-seeing art-pop auteur equally enamored with electro-disco and bossa nova, like a DIY Madonna who never left the Danceteria” (Pitchfork), she's returned with her third album, the urgent A RUPTURE A CANYON A BIRTH. Described as “both extremely fun and nakedly emotional” (Stereogum), it's a journey of fragility, mortality, chance, clarity through collapse, and the erotic energy that can come in moments of deep stabilization. “Bezic’s glassy vocals seem braced for uncertain adventure, poised between melancholy and euphoria” (Pitchfork) as she builds a sonic world that's simultaneously effervescent and weighty, adventurous and filled with pop satisfaction. In her live show Bezic takes the conceptual edges of her work and pushes them with a physical abandon, “keeping the audience rapt even when she [is] just dancing hypnotically” (Brooklyn Vegan). A RUPTURE A CANYON A BIRTH operates under the foreboding assumption that in life, there are no guarantees. So what’s a girl to do? With this album, Jane Inc. says: “Meet me on the dancefloor.”
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