Love and Fortune (Dinked Edition #368)

On Love and Fortune, the third album from Australian musician Stella Donnelly and first for Brace Yourself Records, Donnelly returns with a deeply personal and anchored set of songs, a body of work that traces the journey back to herself after a period of profound change. Recorded in Naarm/Melbourne, the album carries the grounding energy of place, offering a sonic landscape that feels both intimate and expansive.

After several intense years on the road, Donnelly stepped away from touring to re-evaluate her relationship with music and to ask whether she still loved it. That quiet pause led to a deeper listening: to her instincts, her emotions, and the many past versions of herself. What emerged is a collection of songs shaped by multiple endings — the dissolving of relationships, the closing of chapters, the echo of things that once felt permanent. These are breakup songs, but not just of the romantic kind. They mark a shedding of skins, a release of old expectations, and a cautious openness to what might come next.

“These songs wouldn't leave me alone,” Donnelly says. “Like seagulls, they screamed at me when I rode to work, they pecked at me while I wrote essays, and they stole my chips the second I thought I was happy without music.”

Tapping back into this source, Donnelly arrives at a starker sound that lays bare the individual behind the artist. Love and Fortune blends pianos and guitars, as in her earlier work, but this time the arrangements are more exposed, more intentional. It captures the stiller self, the reflective self, that gently asks where to next. There is a clarity here, the kind that comes from reconnecting with what matters. The result is Donnelly’s most open-hearted and self-assured work to date — a record about loss, certainly, but even more about the quiet, enduring fortune of finding one’s way home.

Love and Fortune follows 2019’s Beware of the Dogs and 2022’s Flood, two albums that marked out Donnelly as one of Australia’s finest contemporary songwriters and drew praise and acclaim from the likes of The Guardian, Pitchfork, NME, BBC Radio 1, Clash, DIY, NPR, BBC 6 Music, Paste and many more.

Side A

1. Standing Ovation 
2. Being Nice
3. Feel It Change
4. Baths
5. Year of Trouble
6. Please Everyone

Side B

7. W.A.L.K
8. Friend
9. Ghosts
10. Love and Fortune
11. Laying Low