A new kind of breakup album: Stella Donnelly’s ‘Love and Fortune’ is an honest account of friendship and loss

“I needed to put this out so I can move on.”

Stella Donnelly stopped writing music for two years. Not because she ran out of things to say but because what needed to be said felt too raw to touch. A friendship had ended and the weight of it sat differently than romantic heartbreak ever had.

“Breakups with romantic partners, I care less about,” Stella tells me. “Friendships are heavier.”

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She started studying, got a job and figured music was done for her. But songwriting kept creeping back in, persistent and unavoidable, until Stella had to accept something fundamental about herself.

“These songs wouldn’t leave me alone,” she 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.”

What emerged is her most introspective album yet, built around the framework of a friendship breakup, but reaching into the broader mechanics of loss and endings. Each song on Love and Fortune tackles a specific emotion or energy, creating a map of how relationships dissolve and what gets left behind.

“I’d actually written a really petty song first, and I was like ‘I can’t put this out on its own, it’s not right or completely true’. This is just one part of a whole complex thing,” Stella explains. “From that place I knew I needed to write an opposite song, where I was the one holding the guilt, so I wrote ‘Year of Trouble’ to balance it out. Then I needed a song that was more around the feeling of not being replied to and so on.”

That methodical approach stands in contrast to her previous work. For the first time, Stella knew the story from the start, setting limitations that forced her to lean into specificity rather than scrambling to finish songs. The more layers she added around the core subject, though, the less honest it felt.

“Because a lot of the record is around a friendship breakup, the more layers and hoo-ha I was adding around that on the tracks, the less real it felt and less honest, and I felt it did have to be this quiet, introspective record that could give that feeling a voice.”

There’s a line in one of her new songs, ‘Baths’, about drip drying and “standing in her new life” – it’s that suspended moment after getting out of the shower where everything recalibrates. That I especially resonated with, and Stella lit up at the observation.

“Yes, that feeling of getting out of a hot shower, or cold water and just standing there… there must be so much going on, a recalibration in the body that you are having this moment of true presence. Something happens in that moment.”

That stillness runs through the entire album. Less pushing forward, more sitting with what is. Stella’s work has always been beautifully raw but this feels more stripped back, whether in arrangements or the hyper-introspection of the lyrics themselves.

“There are moments I’m suspended in the air, so it doesn’t necessarily always feel grounded but I think the process of making it, and maybe the sounds are closer to my first EP, than other pieces of music,” she says. “So in that sense it’s grounded.”

Writing about something so intimate and personal came with complications. Friendship breakups aren’t always something you just announce, partially out of respect for the other person. So friendship became a motif rather than the whole story, creating space for broader reflections on human relationships and behaviour.

“All I’m trying to do my entire life is make sense of human dynamics,” Stella says. “Why things happen, [why we] treat each other in certain ways. Really, I’m just trying to explore the experience of it, which is why so often I love to talk about other people to gather a sense of why.”

Her relationship with songwriting has shifted as she’s gotten older. She recalls recently bumping into an old friend at a show who explained she wasn’t writing much anymore because her frontal lobe had grown. Stella tells me she’s been noticing something similar.

“What I’m finding is, from my early twenties to now, there’s only certain situations I can write from a place of joy and not get in my own way,” she says. “Those moments are when I’m premenstrual… but also being ADHD, which also means less of frontal lobe use. I’m learning there are benefits to not being neuro-typical.”

Love and Fortune took shape during a particularly challenging period. Stella was dropped by her label, navigating the friendship breakup, fielding forces telling her to quit music entirely. Her sense of self-worth got tangled up in questions about tying identity to creativity and output. Now she feels like a completely different person from when she first wrote these songs, though she’s proud of how the album functioned as a navigation tool through that time.

“This album felt like a stepping stone,” Stella says. “I needed to put this out so I can move on. I gave the seagulls my whole bag of chips.”

Initially, some songs felt like just-for-her territory. Then she played them for her two best friends, Selena and Ashlyn, who live in different parts of the world. They clicked with songs in unexpected ways, found meanings Stella hadn’t intended and ultimately gave her the confidence to release the work.

“There’s nothing like having your friends tell you to put music out, especially friends who are honest with you,” she says. “There’s also nothing like a breakup to look around and see what’s around you now, and you realise the people you do have in your life are really special.”

The final song, ‘Laying Low’, captured that moment of walking through the door into whatever comes next. Now Stella’s writing from that new place, and it shows.

When I spoke to her last month, she had written her first proper love song; generous in ways her earlier work, like ‘Mosquito’, might not have been. There’s newness in it. A wildness, a presence. “I’m feeling like I’m having all of these wild, new experiences. That’s what the new songs are looking at,” she says. “That will be fun to record.”

Seasons are changing, literally and metaphorically. Her new writing has more space, more colour, more liveliness. But this album, quiet and introspective as it is, needed to exist first. It’s the first record she’s produced herself, entirely her vision, executed with whatever resources she had at the time.

“I guess the complexity of friendship, that’s a big one on the album obviously,” Stella says when asked what she hopes people take from the album. “Even just that I did what I could, with what I had in that time. I took this as far as I could.”

Stella Donnelly’s latest album, Love and Fortune was released on November 7, listen here.