“In mythology, women’s voices are seen as either evil or unbearably annoying,” says Stelmanis. “I think it’s my singing voice that draws people into my project — but at the same time, it’s also what repels people. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback about my voice being too intense for radio, or annoying to listen to.”

Using that divisive power to dramatic effect on “Siren Song,” Stelmanis puts a sapphic spin on the folklore. This time, she’s the siren: lovelorn, heartbroken, and calling out to lure another back in. Co-written with Patrick Holland, the danceable track pleads and beckons. It’s a recurring theme on the record, where Stelmanis realized nearly every song feels like a “one-way dialogue.”

“I went through a big breakup and I had to leave London, where I was living, and move back home,” says Stelmanis. “I went from a musician who essentially lived out of a suitcase for like 10 years, never spending more than three months in a place, to a full-on Toronto homebody.”

The new album bleeds with confessional lyrics pulled from a diaristic Google Doc Stelmanis kept while her world fell apart. In the five years since her last album HiRUDiN, she wrestled privately with these “embarrassing” feelings of heartbreak before deciding to put them fully on display. She says she hadn’t kept a journal that faithfully since she was a teenager discovering she was a lesbian.

“All the songs on the record are just so vulnerable,” says Stelmanis. “I think in order for me to feel comfortable putting this out, I had to create a projection or dramatization. So calling it Chin Up Buttercup made it feel tongue-in-cheek and kind of silly.”

The tough-love saying, paired with the album’s raw cover — Stelmanis gazing tearfully upward in agony — reveals a self-awareness about the drama of it all. It gives her a window to express these feelings while recognizing how trivial or corny they might seem, if not for their sheer universality.

When asked if she’s nervous to perform these pieces live, she says singing has always been a kind of somatic excavation. You cry, you surrender to the wave, you let it all out. But one thing that has changed is her relationship to her own instrument — her voice — as she’s gotten older. She’s recently started yawning therapy.

“I’ve always been a low-maintenance singer — I’ve never really warmed up,” says Stelmanis. “So I tried this yawning training, where they say that the purest human voice is that of a baby crying. And then for the rest of your life, you’re learning to sort of inhibit yourself.”

The technique works — both as a warm-up and as a metaphor for this album. The best music is sheer catharsis, whether for the maker, the listener, or ideally both. When I ask what her own “screaming-in-the-shower” song might be, her answer surprises me.

“The song is ‘I’m Blue,’” Stelmanis laughs. “You know, I’m blue da ba dee da ba da? That was my pandemic song — every time I was sad, my partner would blast it.”

Leave it to Stelmanis to turn an earworm like “I’m Blue” into an emotional release. After all, catharsis doesn’t always arrive in a whisper or a wail — sometimes it comes in the form of a cheesy ’90s Europop anthem. With Chin Up Buttercup, Austra proves that healing, like pop music, works best when you don’t hold back.