“To be honest, I think that I’m the most grounded I’ve ever been,” Katie Austra Stelmanis confesses. “Before the pandemic, I was never in one place longer than three months.” The life of an artist is one that’s constantly in motion. Time is but a footnote when the future is uncertain. And moving from city to city, people to people, idea to idea, begets a situation where nothing can bind you to the present. It’s in this transitional space—a sort of liminal area found between the present and the future—where Stelmanis lived.
“I literally lived out of a suitcase and was bouncing between cities and whatever. And that was just, like, I was used to it.” But the release of her 2020 record HiRUDiN amidst a global pandemic meant cancelling tour dates. It meant moving back home from London to Toronto. It meant isolating herself for months on end during Toronto’s restrictive lockdowns. Add in a devastating breakup from her long-term partner, and Stelmanis’ life had finally stopped moving.
In retrospect, this sudden shift in her life was exactly what she needed. “Honestly, I actually wasn’t that sad to have to cancel them all because I had just come off many years of constant touring. And so I think that I just really needed to stay put and stay in one place.” With this newfound stability, she had time to not only break away from touring but also music as a whole.
“I actually took a break from music for a while and kind of just started writing words.” These words—pages upon pages of sporadic and unfiltered thoughts—presented themselves with an emotional abrasiveness she’d never written before. After considerable deliberation, she decided that this would be the direction her new record was heading. “I think I made that decision because I had never written lyrics like that before. So when I went through and was reading what I had written, I was kind of surprised that those have come out of me because it wasn’t something that I had done before.”
Chin Up Buttercup was born from the stream-of-consciousness style ramblings scattered throughout her notebooks—the erratic emotions that spawned from a devastating breakup, the isolating and quiet pandemic winters. It took a while for her to begin the process of writing a new record. Working alongside close friend and collaborator Kieran Adams, the duo retreated to his family’s home in North Toronto. It was a nifty place with very little furniture. They would go up every couple of weeks, hang out, and write songs on the grand Steinway piano sitting in one of the rooms.
Whereas she described HiRUDiN’s production process as blind dates with new collaborators, here, she kept it tightly knit: “Usually if I’m collaborating, I’ll collaborate with a bunch of different people, but this was just the two of us.” In between these intimate sessions, alongside her unconventional lyrical content, Stelmanis found herself in a new relationship. It’s through her new partner that would she find the inspiration for her new record:
“They grew up in rural France and they had all these Euro dance records that I never listened to. And every weekend during the darkest days of the winter, we would play this euphoric Euro dance, which was in total contrast to the actual world that we were living in (…) I really wanted to be able to capture that euphoria, or at least moments of it on this record. I don’t want it to be a depressing record, I want to have these moments that I felt in that time.”
In fact, these blissfully carefree moments—afternoons dancing around her apartment—sparked a working theory: “I sort of developed this theory that in order to be happy, it’s not really about these big milestones or big successes,” she emphasizes. “It’s about what you’re doing in your day to day. What you can do hour by hour to kind of keep yourself good. And in that sense, success is actually irrelevant because all that matters is what you actually do with your time and who’s around you.” It’s simple, sure, but personal growth is never linear. In fact, Stelmanis had only come to this revelation through immense introspection.
“I feel like, in the past five years, I’ve done a lot of work to understand my role in the music industry,” she continues. “It’s a balance between accepting where you are but also trying to be an ambitious person and looking forward.” This ambition populates the record. The orchestral first half of “The Hopefulness of Dawn” draws visual comparisons to a musical confession booth. Washes of ethereal strings motion a fervent sense of bliss until it breaks into an unrestrained ‘90s Euro-trance beat. She described the title of her record as embodying “this feeling of trying so hard to be perceived as an emotionally stable, high-functioning person, but actually, you’re kind of an emotional disaster.”
It’s a blunt description that could accurately summarize the juxtaposition on every track. “It’s when you have these big feelings and big emotions that you actually are not quite in control of but you’re trying really hard to maintain control of them.” She describes how, during periods of emotional duress, people will naturally “be repelled” by strong emotions. “In response, we all work so hard to make it seem like everything’s fine and great. So I guess then, Chin Up Buttercup to me is sort of (like) that. Not wanting to scare people off with big and over the top emotions.”
During our conversation, she brings up Lilly Allen’s new record as an example of this divide between audience and artist. More specifically, the split responses from listeners regarding its confessional-style lyrics. “It’s gotten a lot of positive feedback because of how vulnerable it is, but there’s also a lot of backlash. People are calling her crazy and all this stuff. And I think when you’re vulnerable like that, you’re always going to kind of get a bit of both,” she explains. “There’s going to be people that respond to that vulnerability with a deeper sense of connection and then there’s going to be the people who are afraid of it.”
In an age where social media has propelled us into a self-imposed surveillance state, we often attempt to conduct ourselves with our image in mind. “I think that’s why a lot of people are experimenting with being more vulnerable, because everyone’s just exhausted by this glossy sheen that exists over everybody’s lives on the internet. And I think people are desperate for deeper connections with other human beings.” Because online personal branding has become normalized in contemporary society, we’ve become socially conditioned to fear anything that breaks down that veneer. Anything that keeps us from exposing our true and ugly selves is something worthy of preservation.
“I think people are really craving vulnerability because social media is so impersonal and that’s just how we interact with the world for the most part.” With Chin Up Buttercup, she isn’t attempting to reinvent herself, but rather showcase who she is when no one’s looking. “People are trying to find ways to break through the impersonality of our lives, and people are attracted to that.”
Chin Up Buttercup takes all these concepts into consideration—the idea of succumbing to your most erratic moments and putting them on a stage, being brave enough to let people see you for who you really are. Moments of love and hate constantly dance back and forth like resentful lovers. “You said I needed my own friends/So I found them/And you fucked them,” she opens on her lead single “Math Equation.” On “Blindsided,” she recalls the moment her partner broke it off, oscillating between an isolated plucky synth line and a reverberated cluster of ethereal noise.
She defines her new record as a “euphoric breakup record.” An emotional journey that, by the end of the record, “you’re able to feel this sort of emotional release.” Chin Up Buttercup could very easily be defined by the conditions that created it, but instead, Stelmanis takes control and uses the past as a blueprint for the future. A future where she can find joy in the mundanity of everyday living. It is, by her own standards, the most honest she’s ever been.
Chin Up Buttercup is out November 14 via Domino.
