Donald Trump has just been sworn in as the President of the United States. Meanwhile, somewhere north, Katie Stelmanis has just gotten what we all need at this point—a good nap. Not watching the ceremony wasn’t a formal protest (although she’s certainly not opposed to the idea) but rather the result of a bout of insomnia the night before. Life, says the Austra frontwoman, just caught up with her.
“I think that we were all blindsided by the situation that we’re in right now,” she muses from her temporary home in Toronto (where she’ll reside after rescuing her furniture from Montreal). “I think that part of that has to do with the fact that we don’t actually have any control over social media or the media in general anymore. I think that it’s turned into something huger and dangerous than any of us had ever anticipated. As someone who is a content creator, I think that there’s a lot more responsivity than anyone has ever considered. There is a reason that Trump is in power and a lot of that is because of the clickbait nature of the internet. I think humans are going to have to take a lot of responsibility for that.”
It’s one of the many heady topics she tackles over the course of Austra’s third LP, Future Politics. A loose concept album about utopia, Stelmanis says it was only a lucky coincidence that it was released on the same day a man came into power who many will argue is working for the exact opposite. Predominately written solo (bandmates Maya Postepski, Dorian Wolf and Ryan Wonsiak joined in for the recording and touring process) the album was her way of recapturing a sense of optimism when the world was telling her otherwise.
But don’t mistake her for a tortured artist. There’s way too much joy implied in each word for that. As Stelmanis explains it, her time down and out during Montreal’s brutal winter was cured by an impromptu trip to Mexico City that ended up lasting six months. She raves about her time there, expressing gratitude for the friendships she formed and decrying the necessity of bottled water.
She punctuates these statements with easy laughter. “I think when I first started writing this record I was feeling despair and real hopelessness,” Stelmanis recalls. “I was looking for a way out. The way I was looking for a way out was reading any opportunity I got about people’s ideas for the future. Any time I would come across something that was about post capitalism or anything about how we could get somewhere cooler or somewhere more just I would want to absorb it immediately. I was so consumed and obsessed with this idea of the future and what possible futures there are.”