AUSTRA’S CHIN UP BUTTERCUP OUT NOVEMBER 14 VIA PINK FIZZ (CANADA) AND DOMINO (WORLDWIDE)
WATCH / SHARE “MATH EQUATION” HERE
BUY / STREAM “MATH EQUATION” HERE
PRE-SAVE CHIN UP BUTTERCUP HERE
PRE-ORDER CHIN UP BUTTERCUP HERE
“Katie Stelmanis has a voice like a beacon.” - Pitchfork
“Austra’s music [is] the sort of thing that can fill up a room and encircle you.” - Stereogum
“Dynamic pop songs that show just how pleasurable unconventional song choices can be.” - Nylon
Photo credit: Lamia Karic // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Austra, the pop project of vocalist and composer Katie Stelmanis, returns today with news of her new album Chin Up Buttercup, due out November 14, 2025 on Pink Fizz (Canada) and Domino (Worldwide).
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.
Stelmanis unleashed her pain over the breakup into poetic fragments in a cathartic Google document that eventually became the source for the album’s powerful lyrics. One such example is captured vividly in the album’s first riveting single “Math Equation”: ‘You said I needed my own friends / So I found them / Then you fucked them’. There is an unmistakable type of sapphic chaos threaded through every song, and “Math Equation” is equal parts catchy clapback and bittersweet plea for reconnection. “Math Equation” comes today via a video directed by Trevor Blumas.
WATCH / SHARE “MATH EQUATION” HERE
BUY / STREAM “MATH EQUATION” HERE
Chin Up Buttercup is available to pre-order on limited edition Neon Orange vinyl, standard Black vinyl, CD and digitally. LP formats come with a A2 double-sided poster; the CD comes with a 6-panel poster. Pre-order HERE
MORE ABOUT AUSTRA + CHIN UP BUTTERCUP
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.” - Louise Erdrich
‘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.
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.
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. By the final track we love this anti-hero; she is shining a light on our universal shame, making us laugh at our own abject desperation. - Zoe Whittall
PRE-SAVE CHIN UP BUTTERCUP HERE
PRE-ORDER CHIN UP BUTTERCUP HERE
CHIN UP BUTTERCUP ARTWORK // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
TRACKLIST
01 Amnesia
02 Math Equation
03 Siren Song
04 Chin Up Buttercup
05 Fallen Cloud
06 Blindsided
07 Think Twice
08 Look Me in the Eye
09 The Hopefulness of Dawn
10 Good Riddance
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