Austra – Feel It Break

With a tense phantom-like clasp, Katie Stelmanis’ icy vocals disarm the listener, seeping under one’s skin like anaesthetic. Her operatic proclivity is realised on The Beast, whereas Darken Her Horse is instantly reminiscent of The Knife, teeming with piercing MIDI and scintillating synth trickles. The accompanying video for recent single Beat And The Pulse features erotic lesbian interpretive dance, webbed hands and warped teets.

The Toronto-bred trio shares its name with the goddess Austra from Latvian folklore, personifying the morning blaze. Their esoteric sound is vying for the freak-out, bound within Pandora’s box alongside Siouxsie & The Banshees, Zola Jesus and Fever Ray. Yet with former Björk sound engineer D. Taylor summoning an upbeat pulse at the helm of the project, Feel It Break has a surprisingly accessible quality: feral as CocoRosie and simultaneously remixable as Ladytron.