Stella Donnelly - Love and Fortune
The first time I “met” Stella Donnelly was at Glastonbury Festival in 2019. I’d become quietly enamoured with her debut album Beware of the Dogs in the months leading up to the event and decided it was a good idea to tell her as much. Striding over to her in the hum of the Leftfield tent, I approached with the casual nonchalance that comes from one too many beers, before suddenly realising she was chatting with none other than Billy Bragg. Such was my fright at being confronted with not one but two objects of my adoration that I audibly exclaimed, “Oh, fuck that,” turned on my heels, and scurried off into the crowd.
Meeting her properly, several years later, much has changed.
Back then, Stella’s music - in particular her breakout single ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ - felt like a definitive commentary on the times. Released at the height of the Me Too movement, it chronicled the sexual assault of a close friend with a starkness that demanded attention far beyond the indie circles from which she’d emerged. Pitchfork described it as “a very powerful reminder — and a quiet threat” to those who dismissed the dominance of rape culture the moment had sought to confront. It was seismic, the kind of track that rattles your understanding of the world and leaves it irrevocably altered.
For many of us, those were fractious years. “I think my social group maybe halved in that time,” Stella tells me, reflecting on the fallout. “There were the people that kind of moved with the times and had a social conscience and were able to grow and acknowledge things, and then there were the people that just dug their heels in, refused to acknowledge it and got really defensive.”
Following the breakthrough of ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ and its subsequent ripple effect, her ascent was swift. Beware of the Dogs confirmed her as more than just a viral moment, and she soon found herself swept up in the familiar whirlwind of a star on the rise.
Photo Credit: Stella Donnelly by Nick McKinlay
The last time she was in the UK was back in 2022, supporting Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, just ahead of the release of her spellbinding sophomore record, Flood. By then, the pace of life on the road had already begun to take its toll. “The reason I overcooked it many years ago was I just booked so many tours back to back that I lost my grounding,” she recalls. When she first started receiving offers, she accepted almost all of them. “All I wanted to do was be a touring musician.”
Eventually, though, that pace caught up with her.
“I wasn’t in love with music anymore,” she confesses. After touring so intensively, every attempt to put pen to paper felt like an obligation, a way of keeping the momentum going and keeping the people around her happy. So she decided to quit.
“I got a sewing machine and thought I was really into making clothes, but the clothes were terrible,” she laughs. She tried other things too, searching for some kind of alternative calling. “I got a job, just lived a pretty regular life, rode my bike around Melbourne. And then, slowly but surely, I’d come home from work and start writing songs again.”
This period of rediscovery produced her 2025 release, Love and Fortune, which arrived from a markedly different place than any of her previous work. The perspective of the project had shifted, turning inward to explore the breakdown of a close friendship and her own rupture with music. It also came in the wake of being dropped by Secretly Canadian - the label that first brought her work to a wider audience.
“I cried for like two days,” she remembers. What initially felt like a crushing defeat soon, however, became something much more affirming. “I felt like they wanted more from me than I was able to give creatively at that time, and that was feeling really stressful.” If there was a silver lining, it lay in the fact that she could now create at her own pace, free from any expectations she had internalised.
Still, her newfound freedom didn’t feel as romantic as it reads on the page.
“After being dropped by the label, nobody knew I was making this album. It was the middle of winter in Melbourne. I was recording in this studio that my bandmate could get on a really good deal,” she says, “but the studio had a ‘For Sale’ sign out the front, and it was next door to a record shop that closed down halfway through the album. It was fucking bleak.”
Photo Credit: Stella Donnelly by Nick McKinlay
During its production, she half-convinced herself that perhaps nobody would ever hear the record. In some ways, that uncertainty became liberating.
The album doesn’t sound like an attempt to regain footing or prove relevance; it feels unshackled. The work of someone who stepped back long enough to remember why they started making music in the first place. Human, and with its own distinct heartbeat, it is without doubt her finest collection of songs to date.
Commercial pressures exist, of course, but for us, art has always been about the transfer of feeling from artist to listener. Across her back catalogue, Stella Donnelly has refined that ability with increasing clarity. On Love and Fortune, anything extraneous is stripped back, leaving her voice and her words at the centre.
“With my next album, my goal is to be far more observational,” she says. “I barely want to say the words ‘I’ and ‘me’ in the lyrics, and I’m trying to write the album standing up rather than sitting down.” This feels partly in response to the insular nature of Love and Fortune, but also like a commitment to remaining attuned to the world beyond herself - the same impulse that once drove her to take on the world so directly from the isolation of Perth all those years ago. “I’m trying to stay aware of stuff and not just get too caught up in my own crap,” she jokes.
That renewed perspective isn’t just confined to her writing. With the UK leg of her tour on the horizon, she feels a similar sense of opening up, sounding less wary of the road this time around. The difference, she insists, is as much structural as it is emotional. “I feel like I’ve taken the break that I needed to, I’ve nurtured the relationships with the people in my life in such a way that I feel so strong going back out on tour now.”
Nearly a decade into her career, that may be the clearest measure of success yet.
Stella Donnelly’s tour across the UK begins on 19th March, you can find more details on the shows at https://stelladonnelly.com/
