How rejection triggered Austra's chaotic third act

Austra may have started out as a band, breaking through from the get-go with debut single “Beat and the Pulse”, but the past 15 years have seen a shift into something much more personal to Stelmanis alone. An alter ego of the kind that Beyoncé explored with Sasha Fierce, for example – more about confidence than costume. Future Politics, Austra’s third album, hinted at that shift, but it was 2020’s courageous HiRUDiN that underlined it. Now, with her fifth album out this week, the alter ego concept is elevated to a whole new level. In the twisted world of Chin Up Buttercup, the mirror has three faces, and one of them is crying.

If HiRUDiN was, as she described it at the time, “an experiment in vulnerability,” Chin Up Buttercup is all that in freefall. Less of an experiment than a laboratory explosion, these ten songs chart the chaotic misadventures of Buttercup, an “emotional-demon alter ego” through which Stelmanis creatively revisits the wreckage of her most extreme breakup. “It’s so weird how you can be in someone’s life 100% of the time one day, and the next they’re just gone,” she tells BEST FIT when we meet in Toronto. It’s the opening day of the city’s annual film festival and downtown is rammed, so we tuck ourselves away in the small courtyard of a café in Kensington Market, wiping the morning’s rainfall off our seats.

Our chat comes just a week after the premiere of “Math Equation” – the first of Chin Up Buttercup’s three singles – and Stelmanis is feeling both excited and anxious. It’s the first time she’s talked about the record to the press and she confesses to a few sleepless nights spent worrying that it’s “too over the top” or that she’s giving too much away. “Honestly, I feel sorry for my ex, because she just wanted to break up and date somebody else, and here I am all these years later, putting out this record,” she says, laughing.

Rewinding to January 2020, Stelmanis was living in London when, without discernible warning, the woman she loved woke up one day, said she wasn’t happy, and buried their life on the spot. Shocked and spiralling, her reaction was so much more physical than she’d experienced through heartbreak before, as if she was a walking, bleeding wound that everyone could see or, even worse, feel pity for.

“I found the whole process of being rejected to be extremely humiliating,” she says, thinking back on those first few months. “I feel like every dark thought I’ve ever had in my life bubbled up to the surface and I then had to process that for the next four years in therapy. I remember one point, about three years into it, I asked ‘Why am I still talking about this?’ and my therapist was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know, man.’”

In the immediate aftermath of the split, Stelmanis flew back to Toronto, fully intending to return to London a couple of months later. But the pandemic, of course, had other ideas, and instead she found herself living back on the same street she grew up on, in a house across the road from her parents. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh god, I’m regressing so hard now,’” she says, shaking her head. “It took me a long time to learn to accept Toronto again.”

As uncomfortable as she felt being perceived in her woundedness, Stelmanis also encountered the harsh reality that, where most people in our lives are concerned, empathy has an expiration date. But, as (bad) luck would have it, two of her close friends were also going through breakups around the same time and, together, the three of them closed ranks. “We called ourselves The Secret Breakup Society, because it wasn’t something we felt like we could talk about with everybody,” she explains. “Together we could talk about our breakups way beyond the point that it’s acceptable to talk about breakups. Even now, if I get triggered about something, I’ll call them up and talk it through.”

Those first months back in Toronto weren’t all tear-stained bedrotting with the curtains drawn, though. On one hand, there was the rollout of HiRUDiN to see through to completion. The album dropped in May 2020, in the thick of the pandemic’s early cloud of dread, and Stelmanis could only sit and watch as scores of planned tour dates went the same way as her relationship, crumbling into dust in an instant. On the other hand, more positively, there was so much to be done in terms of mutual aid and community action.

“I would describe the first six months of the pandemic mostly as a period of adrenaline,” she says, recalling how she and a group of friends would organise weekly queer parties in a Toronto park, where they’d set up speakers and bring in DJs to bring some joy to that first, weird summer. “We called ourselves Bubble Babes, and it would happen every Friday no matter what. I actually look back very fondly on that time. It was such an anchor.”

Around the same time she made I Feel You Everywhere, a concert film and live album taped at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, a (mostly) classical music venue that, in the absence of orchestra shows, invited her to use the space and grand piano for a solo, online ticketed event. Given her still-raw emotions at the time, it became clear she had to choose whether she was going to just pretend that she was okay or lean into absolutely not being that and see where it would take her.

Just as she would later do for Chin Up Buttercup, Stelmanis chose the path of come-what-may and embraced her vulnerability. But, for a long time, something didn’t feel right. “Because I hadn’t really established a character, I had a lot of difficulty putting that film out,” she explains. Being Austra, it turned out, wasn’t enough to bridge the gap of discomfort. Her alter ego needed an alter ego of its own.

For Stelmanis, Buttercup is essentially the embodiment of shame. “She’s all the parts of me that I’m embarrassed by, personified, so she can say and do all these things that I would never say or do,” she says with a knowing wink implied. It may be Buttercup pictured snottily crying on the album sleeve, but Austra and Stelmanis are embedded in there too. “I can laugh at those days now and think, ‘Wow, I was so over the top,’ and it’s kind of funny. It wasn’t at the time, but now I’m able to see it as just a part of being alive.”

By the time I Feel You Everywhere did eventually come out in May 2021, Stelmanis had already begun to write and collect material for what would become Chin Up Buttercup. Co-producer Kieran Adams (who you may know as the drummer in Toronto synth-pop trio DIANA) became a key partner in the process, building on a shared love of the Eurodance resurgence to create their own feelgood-ish take on feeling down bad. “It was a side of his music that I’d never really heard before,” she says, remembering the first batch of self-produced dance tracks that Adams had sent her early on in the pandemic. “With everything going on, I was feeling a little bit directionless and wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next, but we slowly started working on stuff together. Then, after about a year, we decided to get serious with it.”

Things didn’t progress linearly, though. Stelmanis took about a year and a half out to work on her first feature-length film score, for the 2023 documentary Swan Song, which won her a Canadian Screen Award earlier this year, and a few other projects besides. When she eventually came back to the songs already written for Chin Up Buttercup, she was able to see them from a fresh perspective that made space for the character of Buttercup to form. “I started to really think about her motivation and her attitude and how I wanted to present those emotions,” Stelmanis says of the process. By turns a wounded dancefloor angel, a dissociating scalpel, a scolding jester, and much more in between, Buttercup goes on quite a journey, from chaotic diva to a Sapphic antihero for the ages.

It wouldn’t quite be accurate to say that Stelmanis isn’t afraid to take risks – the impish “Think Twice” has given her nightmares – but she takes them anyway, making room for humour in a way that none of her previous work has allowed. “Being able to actually laugh at myself and my extreme emotions has been really fun to experience and to work with,” she says, crediting her team of co-conspirators for being willing to “go all-in” on the ridiculousness of the character. “The energy they brought to this project allowed me to push myself in way that I probably wouldn’t have been able to do alone.”

From where she sits now, happily in a new relationship, Stelmanis is grateful for just how much she’s grown away from the avoidant-type person of old. “I had a lot of trouble accessing emotions and communicating,” she says, admitting she’s “basically a walking therapy book now.” “I still struggle a bit with being overly vulnerable or talking about it too much and not seeing that as something kind of undesirable and shameful. I can do it, but there’s a part of me that’s still a bit grossed out.”

It's not so much a case of loving the process as valuing the outcome, then. And, as she has discovered, the windfalls of the work go way beyond romantic relationships. For all our talk on alter egos, perhaps what Chin Up Buttercup really represents is a playful form of ego death. There’s no going back for Stelmanis after this, on a personal level, though where that leaves poor Buttercup only time will tell. The press release may label her a “psycho creep” but is she really all that off her rocker? “That’s what my label said too,” she says, laughing. “They were like, ‘She seems fine, actually.’”

Asked what she thinks is the most psychotic thing that Buttercup has done, she pauses for a moment and smiles. “Honestly, I think just making this record. It’s really unfiltered and I’m sort of scared I’ll just be perceived as an insane person. But I think it’s probably just me projecting. I guess we’ll find out soon!”