Stella Donnelly’s Flood Wades Through an Ocean of Revelation

Perth-based singer/songwriter Stella Donnelly’s first album, the hardened, soul-swelling Beware of the Dogs, solidified her spot among her Oceania contemporaries—Aldous Harding, Julia Jacklin, Alex Lahey and others—in 2019. The songs level at crumbling relationships, holding abusers accountable and losing bodily agency. And as Donnelly drops vivid scenes of trauma into her accounts of everyday life, she broaches heavy topics with an empowering wit that offers punchlines as achingly clever as they are brutally real. On her newest project, Flood, Donnelly scales back the humor in favor of a language that confronts the record’s themes head-on. Though Beware of the Dogs was a #MeToo record unveiled at the movement’s peak, it remains urgent. And while Flood doesn’t address the same themes as directly as its predecessor, it still dares to mine emotional explosions for introspective truths and accountability. Flood packs the punch of a hardened fist, of a bursting desire to put autonomy atop the pedestal.
Aussie songwriters have practically trademarked colloquial ingenuity, as Courtney Barnett proved on last year’s Things Take Time, Take Time and Jacklin will on her own PRE PLEASURE. But where Jacklin and Barnett have tended to center coming-of-age stories, Donnelly’s narratives were more catered to the contemporary, tracking her own woes like an in-progress memoir. Now, Donnelly is, lyrically, walking backwards, zeroing in on how her upbringing shaped her current relationships. While trudging through the muck of generational trauma, she holds close the blueprint that makes her music so singular: the sense of empowerment that comes with interrogating and acknowledging your own past. Though Donnelly often sings in a similar cadence as her peer Barnett, she doesn’t quite match Barnett’s famous drawl—as a result, Donnelly has emerged as an artist with a voice of her own, an always-charming delivery of sometimes very uncomfortable truths.
Preceded by three wonderful singles (“Flood,” “How Was Your Day?” and “Lungs”), Flood is not just a sonic touch-up, but an affecting exploration. On Beware of the Dogs, Donnelly worked through a lot of guitar-centric arrangements. It was bedroom pop with an alt-rock edge; glazed six-strings melded with an occasional run of synths. Donnelly originally composed Flood on the piano, not the guitar. The result is clear and poignant: The record is very much populated with an honed, expansive compositional talent and sharp, intoxicating stanzas (“You’ve got a lot of medals for someone who is losing / You’ve got a lot of trophies, they call it moral bruising / You’re wearing all your ribbons and yelling at the TV / You’re scaring all your housemates with your monologuing” from “Medals” is a personal favorite).
We are welcomed into the world of Flood through a run of Marcel Tussie’s metronomic percussion, which christens the intro of “Lungs.” Through wayfaring vocal harmonies, stuttering pianos and pulsating, two-step drum beats, Donnelly takes us through a story of a family being evicted from their home, told from the POV of a child. “Stretching out the leather on your wallet / That my lungs are filling up / Long live the asbestos on the rental / Yeah it looks alright to me,” she sings in the second verse.