The past year has seen a wider move towards the genre of “tiny utopias”: small, invented idylls that, unlike the colossal world reconfigurations common in speculative fiction, are built to human scale. Whether polemic or meditative, they share a vision: a world better than our own and also within reach. It is, of course, obvious why one might want this now, might long to crawl out of this orange apocalypse and into a utopia. Art might not, as the myth goes, get better during bleak times, but bleak times do make people cling harder to the art they’ve got.
Electronic artist Katie Stelmanis has always made political art, blatantly or subtly, from her time with riot grrl band Galaxy to her more muted project, Austra. But since 2013’s Olympia, politics have gotten more, well, urgent. Stelmanis is Canadian and wrote Future Politics before the election results and before fascism started winning, but the album’s Inauguration Day release is now looming, inescapable subtext. “I was kind of worried it wouldn’t be something that people would be interested in, or connect to... [but it’s] become more relevant than I could’ve ever imagined,” she told CBC.
Future Politics doesn’t depart from Austra’s sound so much as filter it. Stelmanis’ band, and its sound, are pared down, producing straightforward, minimal music akin to club artists like Marie Davidson or Kate Wax, or perhaps Björk’s electronic work. Even Stelmanis’ voice, capable of great force, sounds less operatic than deliberately hollowed-out, as in the tentative melodies of “Beyond a Mortal” and “Gaia” or the collapsing coloratura of “I’m a Monster.”
Austra fills the extra space by surfacing the themes formerly held in the band’s subtext, though occasionally stated, like Olympia’s “I Don't Care (I’m a Man).” While writing this album, Stelmanis was into science fiction and political manifestos—in particular, the Accelerationist Manifesto and Marge Piercy’s canonical Woman on the Edge of Time, a novel whose utopian visions reach its main character amid abuse and institutional detention. “It needed to have a purpose other than just my own ego,” Stelmanis said. And while Future Politics isn’t impersonal—throughout it runs an undercurrent of loss, partly the result of personal and professional departures in Stelmanis’ life—the album concerns itself primarily with the dark side of “the personal is political,” the slow parallel rot of self-contained depression and political turmoil. When the definition of disordered thinking resembles, so closely and measurably, a world increasingly disordered and unmoored from fact, what do you even do? How do you think? How do you begin to conceive a way out?
It’s fitting that the first track of the album is a question: “What if we were alive?” Stelmanis sings over synth pads and unsettled chords, like closing credits for a bittersweet ending. “Freepower,” like its near-namesake, presents a twitchy, unsettled mix and a plea for the personal. The title track is a driving sequencer track shaped like an anthem, but gets only as far as a battle cry: “future politics.” There’s still mourning in the present to get past, after all, and the midsection of the album dwells upon it. “I’m a Monster” begins like the bridge of a club track, the sort with tears-on-the-dancefloor and throbbing backing vocals, but where that track would provide release, there’s only hollowness: “I don’t feel nothing anymore.” “Gaia” dwells upon loss as well; the track most reminiscent of Björk, it’s like a cut from a less optimistic Biophilia, where the environment’s full of more death than life.
Despite all this, Future Politics is essentially an optimistic album, and presents solutions. First: self-care is important. “Deep Thought,” a minute-long, a cappella harp palpitation at the end of the record, is reminiscent of dream pop or chillout, or even ASMR—soothing genres. Second: make connections. “I don’t think it’s possible for me to write in a major key,” Stelmanis said (partly in jest) while touring Olympia, but “I Love You More Than You Love Yourself” accomplishes this musically and metaphorically, taking an idea last seen in dull dance backfill and turning it into an ode to redemptive love. “Utopia” has the album’s lushest arrangement, a whirlwind of chiming trance synths, cheery octaves and airy background vocals, and its most indomitably romantic lyric: “I only want to hold your hand my own damn life/I can picture a place where everyone feels it too.” It’s got the highest notes and most triumphant melodies of the album. It’s music to be escaped into, whether on dance floors or alone somewhere, filled with a little less despair.
