The return of Stella Donnelly adds to the strong wave of new Australian releases for 2022 and this week, she has served up another dose of goodness.
Donnelly’s new single, ‘Flood’, is out now and serves as the title track from her forthcoming album, which fans can get around on August 26. ‘Flood’ follows on from ‘Lungs’, Donnelly’s track that dropped in May.
Arriving at the most perfect of times, ‘Flood’ is a project that came together in the depths of Melbourne’s wintry lockdown last year. As Donnelly says, the song is ‘a sad little adventure’.
“I wrote in the dark depths of a Melbourne winter lockdown where it had been raining for consecutive weeks,” she says.
“Everyone around me was falling into their own version of depression at different times. It felt like a flood of trauma yet at the same time, we were given an opportunity of time to work through stuff that we’d been distracting ourselves with for so long prior to the pandemic.”
Donnelly’s new effort was co-produced by Anna Laverty and Methyl Ethel’s Jake Webb, with co-writing being handled by her band mates Jennifer Aslett, George Foster, Marcel Tussie and Jack Gaby. The output is vulnerable and insightful: the listener can really gain an excellent scope into Stella Donnelly, the artist, as she is in 2022. It’s contemporary and fresh, without losing any of that classic charm that has endeared her to fans everywhere in years gone by.
Along with the release of the single, Donnelly has shared the ‘Flood’ music video. Directed by Nick McKk, Grace Goodwin and Donnelly herself, the narrative of the music video comes delivered with a much sunnier disposition than the circumstances it was written in.
“This clip is pure ridiculous play, like going to your grandparents house where you and your cousins would get up to the most elaborate film projects,” Donnelly explains.
“We always ran around the house making home movies that tried to re-enact other films and much like this clip here, they always ended in some sort of minor catastrophe. With this video for ‘Flood’, we have made a very feeble attempt at recreating the legendary OK GO video clip for ‘Here it Goes Again’ and we failed gloriously.”
