There are two breakups at the heart of Stella Donnelly’s third album. After releasing 2022’s Flood, the 33-year-old Welsh Australian songwriter felt burned out and took time off, then got dropped by Secretly Canadian, the storied U.S. indie label that introduced her lyrical indie rock to a wider audience. At home in Melbourne, she got a job at a cemetery and then a bakery, trying to make life feel local again after having been on tour since her 2017 breakout, and wondered if she might be done with music. But ideas for songs about a recent friendship breakup as grievous as it was mystifying wouldn’t leave her alone. The lack of any kind of expectation nudged her to start casually making music again with a circle of friends, which gave rise to the practically hymnal Love and Fortune—the sort of low-key, invitingly insular album that might never have been possible in a more growth-oriented part of the industry.
These two splits seem to have brought Donnelly the closest to herself she’s been in song. On her 2019 debut, Beware of the Dogs, she grappled with injustice with a distinct combination of humor, acid, and empathy, unafraid to name her targets and make them squirm with her wit. Flood brought curiosity to the awkward misalignments of intimacy, and dabbled in self-implication. But Love and Fortune feels suspended in a stunned haze as Donnelly endlessly turns over pebbles trying to work out what went wrong in her friendship. As she tries to hold onto the memory of her pal, she uncovers regrets, doubt, righteousness, but ultimately stands poleaxed at the void left behind by their relationship’s end.
Early on, Donnelly was often compared to her Aussie peer Courtney Barnett for her knowing picaresques. It’s an archetype many still define them by, though the one thing they share now is how far they’ve both traveled, in markedly different directions. Donnelly’s real strength as a performer is how she brings her effortless choirgirl vocal purity to conversational delivery and innate melodicism, the kind that feels as though you could trace its shapes on the breeze. There are some classic Antipodean indie rock gestures here—opener “Standing Ovation” kicks into Chills-ish twang, and tough post-punk guitar notes sound trapped in the rueful “W.A.L.K”—but Love and Fortune largely hangs on pearlescent little showstoppers where Donnelly’s voice is often barely adorned at all.
She can more than carry it. “Baths” imagines Donnelly’s life in utero as her mum went on protests before the “water rushed into a daughter/Wild river flowing/No one dared to dam.” Singing against the faintest glow of synths, there’s a lambent new promise to the song unsettled by a later line about how “photos with the family/Might be the last time.” It’s one of the few songs not explicitly about her broken friendship, but implies that every beginning has a roughshod end. On “Friend,” her voice is grave and weighty, singing fragmented lines against a low, clear piano motif; there’s a slow solemnity to the song, as if trying to make the irretrievable last just that bit longer. “Am I happier now/Than I was then?” she sings, a gut-punch reminiscent of Hua Hsu’s Stay True, when bereavement pushed him to question how close he and his late friend really were.
At this point, it’s pretty widely acknowledged that the loss of a friendship is as significant as the end of a romantic relationship. Maybe there’s even an argument for it being more devastating, given that romantic love is so specific and intense, but a good friendship is ingrained in every dimension of life, and generally a more forgiving, fluctuating dynamic: Any breakage is more damning. That understanding doesn’t make Donnelly’s generous post-mortem any less penetrating as she approaches it from every angle.
She bloodlets her frustration on “Feel It Change,” making the relatably selfish wish for her friend to tell her she was right, “that I’m the perfect friend who does no harm,” but the prickling tension of acoustic and electric guitars playing the same ruminative refrain knowingly spotlights her unsound argument. We never find out how this rupture came to pass, but we don’t need to. The warm hush of “Ghosts” comes from the lovely fizz of a Wurlitzer, a comfort until you think about how its sound is usually associated with love songs. And the crushing tremble in Donnelly’s voice tells you everything you need to know: Following a three-note piano refrain, the gorgeous “Year of Trouble” subtly rises in panic as she realizes she’ll never solve this mystery, as key change and a switch to weightier, more insistent chords reveal the depth of her devastation: “Since you closed off to me/I been on a lonely ride,” she repeats, her desperation fully exposed.
There are no resolutions here: “Take back my little life/And push you away,” Donnelly sings on “W.A.L.K,” a gorgeous and emotionally punishing earworm. The title track finds no consolation in endless complaining to friends and family, nor self-help gurus who sell books that promise conclusive self-actualization, then publish another one. The breezily funky closer “Laying Low” feels a bit like a weight lifting in its cool ease, but its only reassurance is that in time, every cell in the two friends’ bodies will have renewed, making them biological strangers to one another anyway. It makes Love and Fortune an undeniably sad record, but one of understated beauty: a lonely, faithful votive flickering brightly against the odds.
