The Month in Music About Loving Your Fellow Human
Katie Stelmanis of the electro-pop band Austra is tired of dystopia. Donald Trump’s election has spurred quick-turnaround art about unraveling social bonds and authoritarianism, but civilizational decline was a hot topic even before: city-smashing Marvel movies, end-times fantasies like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, doomsday as a muse for musicians from Radiohead to Britney Spears. Yet Stelmanis decided to make her third album, Future Politics, precisely the opposite of apocalypse porn. Says Austra’s press materials, “The future won’t look like the past: Dystopian dread takes this for granted, but utopian imagination is just as valid.”
Much of popular music has always been, on some level, about utopia—whether a small-scale, temporary one between, the expansive bar rock of Japandroids’s , and romantic short stories of The xx’s all, in their way, offer comfort and escape as they do pop’s eternal work of communicating love for yourfellow human.
