Austra's Katie Stelmanis on those difficult high Cs

Many bands feel ambivalent about playing their biggest single. Austra’s Katie Stelmanis is no different. But her reasons are more practical than artistic. “Lose It is the number one hard song to sing on tour,” the classically-trained vocalist declares. “If your voice is not in absolutely tip-top shape it really shows. I’ll get voice cracks when I sing that song and I’m just shocked that people don’t just walk away. I’m like ‘really? This is OK for you guys? I’m really sorry’.”

At this stage, she’s pretty safe. The Toronto electro ensemble, who are in Australia for the Perth festival among other shows, have long gone past the point of having to try to win over strangers when playing live – they did that, with impressive ease, at the 2012 Laneway festival. Punters at Austra’s upcoming Australian shows are surely already invested in the band. “Yeah, maybe,” says Stelmanis. “And luckily we have a good sound engineer who knows how to catch it right away: she just ups the reverb and turns down my voice.”

She laughs, but such difficulties were clearly something on her mind when it came to creating the band’s second album, Olympia. Austra’s 2011 debut album Feel It Break was Stelmanis and a computer; now she had a suite of bandmates – particularly drummer/multi-instrumentalist Maya Postepski and bassist Dorian Wolf – after three years of touring.

“I made a conscious decision that I wanted the songs to be not as high range as Lose It.” She pauses, thinking. “But then at the same time I find that none of the new songs have the same kind of majesty that Lose It … It still has this impact in the live setting, I think, because it does hit that note that you don’t really hear at any other point in the set.”

Vocals are important to Stelmanis. She came to pop music late, getting into techno after a childhood and adolescence spent listening almost exclusively to classical music and opera. You can hear that influence in Austra’s music too: partially in her very precise vocalisations, but also in the absolute primacy of melody.

“I’ll always write a melody first and go ‘Oh, that’s cheesy’. But then when it’s presented in the right way it’s not really cheesy anymore. I feel like the best music is the music that bridges between being too cheesy and really good,” she says. “That’s the line where you find good pop music.”

The result of that quest was the Debussy-meets-Bjork bedroom electronica of Feel It Break, but there’s an urgency on Olympia that not as apparent on the band’s chilly debut – the result, Stelmanis says, of the relentless touring between Feel it Break and Olympia’s release. The saying goes that every artist has a lifetime to write their first album and six months to write their second. “That’s definitely what happened to us!” she laughs. “It’s a very real cliche.”

For now, she’s concentrating on touring and hoping that it’s not going to be another three years on the road. “It would be nice to spend some time in one place,” she says, with feeling. “That would be completely revolutionary for my lifestyle.”

And, of course, it would mean not having to hit those high Cs in Lose It every night.