On Love and Fortune, Stella Donnelly returns with a deeply personal and anchored album, 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, of hobbies started but never continued, the closing of chapters and 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. The artwork by Sam Love, shows a person held back by fear, unsure whether to dive back into music and the messy whirlpool of public songwriting.

“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 happier without music.”

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. Joining Donnelly on the record are longtime collaborators and friends Marcel Tussie, Jack Gaby and Julia Wallace and new guests Sophie Ozard, Timothy Harvey and Ellie Mason.

With this, the album 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.

Brooke Combe

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