Love and Fortune is an album that earns your trust within seconds, with a softness that hangs in the air like a purple cloud and no rhythm section, just a warm pad and Stella Donnelly’s voice repeating a gentle melody and letting it breathe. Again and again, Donnelly places herself in environments where you could hear a pin drop, using silence and sparseness as tools to assert emotional clarity.

Trust in melody is the album’s guiding principle, and when full instrumentation does arrive, it lands with enormous impact. The opener Standing Ovation opens out at the two-minute mark with jangle-pop guitar and drums flooding in, feeling like throwing open the curtains on a Sunday morning. The subject matter of the album is tender, reflective and bruised with memories, betrayals, and the slow work of disentangling yourself from another person’s gravity. There’s a constant warmth in the delivery, with an audible smile even though the themes are heavy. It’s not happy music in a simplistic sense, rather this is music built on the quiet satisfaction of using songwriting as a way to process emotion and close chapters. The album never rushes or overstates its feelings, instead moving carefully and giving each song the space to say exactly what it needs to and no more.

One of the album’s great pleasures is its unpredictability of texture. From track to track, you’re never quite sure what form the next song will take, sometimes just a piano and a voice, sometimes a fully orchestrated arrangement with layers of harmonies, with a through-line that puts the melodies and stories first. Baths feels like a timeless folk lullaby with minimal accompaniment whilst Year of Trouble and the title track Love and Fortune lean into more unusual chord sequences, and it all feels rooted in an older tradition of songwriting that treated simple melodies as the primary craft to be honed.

W.A.L.K. stands out as one of the album’s clearest demonstrations of Donnelly’s compositional instincts, introducing a melody and allowing it to settle in our minds through repetition. Once it’s fully internalised and you’re humming along, she begins to climb higher and higher to a soaring descant as the instrumentation blooms underneath in a moment of total exhilaration. The closing stretch reinforces the album’s emotional arc beautifully, with the endpoint Laying Low acknowledging the period of withdrawal that follows hurt, while gently declaring the intention to step back into the world on her own terms with calm assertion and agency.

Love and Fortune is special because of how strong the songwriting is, with production that enriches without stealing focus from the melodies or the stories at their core. Songs written to hold a silent room, with sadness and millenial weariness but a prevailing feeling of gratitude. By the time Laying Low closes things out, you’re left with that soft and thankful calm that comes from having sat with something quiet and honest.