Austra

Austra is a Canadian composer, electronic producer, and singer best known for her ethereal voice and genre-blending sound. Over the past decade and a half, she’s released four albums with the renowned indie label Domino Records and has played sold-out shows from Brazil to Japan to Warsaw and beyond. Her forthcoming fifth album, Chin Up Buttercup, has been described as “a grief record you can dance to." It's a narrative about the pressure one feels to keep functioning normally through disastrous circumstances.

The vivid music of Austra is born of the creative force that is producer, songwriter, and recording engineer Katie Stelmanis and the most powerful instrument at her disposal - her voice, one that is capable of effortlessly evoking moments of personal and universal drama. Augmented and assisted in live performance by a rotating cast of musicians, Austra's recordings are essays in texture, atmosphere, and emotion that increasingly examine the contemporary sensation of being haunted by the future.

“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.

Stelmanis and co-producer Kieran 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.