#Stella Donnelly - Flood

[kitschke]

AOTD 9/30: Flood - Stella Donnelly

v good cover. fun to look at

[haveyoulistenedtothisalbum-poll]

Tracklist:

Lungs • How Was Your Day • Restricted Account • Underwater • Medals • Move Me • Flood • This Week • Oh My My My • Morning Silence • Cold

Spotify ♪ Bandcamp ♪ YouTube

[music-i-reallylike]

Stella Donnelly - Flood

Listening to this album feels like lying down on your bed on a cool autumn afternoon, watching life pass by through the window as the trees rustle in the crisp breeze. The warm yet sparse instrumentation, with some songs only having an ambient piano accompaniment, denotes a sort of melancholic loneliness. And along with Stella Donnelly's soft but vibrant voice, there is a tone of introspection towards various human relationships, whether it be her own or observations of others.

Favourites:

Lungs

How Was Your Day?

Restricted Account

Underwater

Move Me

Oh My My My

Morning Light

Cold

[harrietteb]

Intro to Digital Techniques

I am going to begin this blog by saying that I wrote the idea for Suburbia in 2021 while working in Queensland. I think I was projecting at the time my longing for my childhood (I graduated in 2020) and simplicity again and I like how “immature” the lyrics kinda are. I picture my 14 year old self walking home on a hot afternoon in my school uniform after a hard day when I listen to this song. My initial recording has the piano, harmonies, bass and drums and over the past month I have re-recorded each and beefed up the piece with synths, more drums and a clav. I also am adding in the inspiration section things I was listening to heavily at the time and had in my world. 

Inspiration and Listening ideas

60’s pop inspired, close harmonies (think The Mamas and The Papas, Beach Boys, etc)

Unnerving, satire, punching bass. 

Taking an older idea and producing it - I have attached the original MP3 from the first version below. 

Lyrics are a sort of satire about a 14 year old me, a middle class white girl in the suburbs who is searching for oppression to make herself feel better. 

I was told by a friend that “no one makes songs that fade in and fade out like a Taylor Swift song anymore”, so that's where the intro and outro came from. 

I was inspired by the harmonies and synths in Flood by Stella Donnelly in the more modern version of my song. 

SPOTIFY INSPIRATION PLAYLIST 

Initial thoughts

The original idea I wrote 2 years ago with no music theory knowledge, but I love the A Asus movement, it makes it feel unnerving and unfinished. It makes the chorus more obvious I think. Also the movement from the A to the F chord doesn't really make sense in the key of A, I know that much but I am also still very lost on music theory. But I still really love that movement, I think it’s strange and satisfying. 

ATTACHED MP3 OF ORIGINAL SONG -> 

Composition ideas

Block harmonies and counter melody harmonies. I’ve used these before in other compositions.

Synths that pan and move around the listener.

Simpler backing to focus on the harmonies and vocals. 

I also wanna make it sound like all the instruments are sorta having a conversation with each other, the harmonies, synths and drums are all talking to 14 year old me. 

I want it to sound sorta nostalgic, that's why I’ve used electronic and retro sounding synths, I do want it to sorta sound like something you’ve lost. I think also specifically the main synth (the “Wide Suitcase”) sounds like a hot day, I think of the dreamy bell quality. 

The lyrics and title “Suburbia” are inspired by both the place I grew up (Berowra Heights) and the effect capitalism and social media had on me as a teenager. 

Elements

The bass and the kick are vital to making the movement of this piece make sense, I used the EQ trick we learnt in class and allowed both to have their own space in the lower sections. I have attached images.

I also EQ’d the vocals and harmonies in order to cut out any rumble from the high and low end. I made the cutoff a bit more intense on the vocals, this pulls them further back from the lead vocal line. 

I also added a Clav on top of the bass to create more of a “wah wah wah” sound, I think it creates more movement and the bass line more iconic. I also put them into a track stack and compressed them to squish them together. 

I also put all the harmonies in a track stack, I panned 2 to each side (4 tracks in total) and neglected adding any reverb on the harmonies. 

I added “Retro Vibes Synth Bells” and “Suitcase Mk I Overdrive” synths to create interest. I also added a slight chorus onto the  “Suitcase Mk I Overdrive” to help add to the unresolved feeling. They also each have some panning, the Retro bells move from right to left when it plays at the end of the second verse. The Suitcase has two tracks each playing a different note in its counter melody, they’re each panned to one side. This makes it sound like a call and response. 

I am using 3 different types of drum kits and I have gone through to each repeat and changed the velocity, this helps them sound more like live drums. 

The melody changes in the first verse to the second, this I think adds to the unfinished feel and also allows me to experiment with harmonies and rhythms. Same as the drums. 

SOUNDCLOUD LINK

[playologist]

Alphanumeriband, Jan 2023

A: Amyl and the Sniffers - Comfort to Me

Oh, just good, fun, ocher as all get-out Aussie pubpunk. Named after Amyl Nitrate “you break it out, have 30 seconds of pure fun and then a headache; just like listening to us!”

F: Frou Frou - Details

O: Osi and the Jupiter - Stave

Okay, yup. Really just easy to get lost in the sway, intensity and just super feelsy aesthetic of the music. Really does feel like if someone looked at Sigur Rós and thought “it’s just a bit too joyful and twee, really.”

R: Riff - Que Sea Rock

Okay so this band is actually really good and fun. They’re nice to listen to, pretty easy, riffy old school rock from Argentina and the lyrics being in Spanish is super pleasant and means I can read while listening to them unlike any other band with singing. Their wiki also says something about cyberpunk and Mad Max 2 so I’m gonna have to translate it and read more, because that’s got me intrigued. Anyway, they’re not that far from being as fun and technically skilled as something like Eagles of Death Metal, in my mind, and that’s pretty impressive esp considering this album is from ‘97.

S: Stella Donnelly - Flood

Just super sweet and modern album. Full of longing and yearning and varies from boot-stompers to tracks that make you feel like slow-dancing by yourself. Fun facts: we’re born one day apart and her first album was Thrush Metal and I super regret not listening to that one first, now that I know.

U:

Y: Yello - Point

Wtf, this album slaps so hard. Has that absolute hard, groovy feel you’d expect from early Puscifer, but with some Cristobal De Tapias De Veer experimentation in some of the instrument and loop choices.

[dougwallen]

Stella Donnelly review for The Weekend Australian

[reckonslepoisson]

Flood, Stella Donnelly (2022)

Stella Donnelly’s charm isn’t just that she’s a really impactful, nuanced storyteller; it’s the manner in which she unravels those stories, loading them with power and charm. What begins as exceptionally pleasant chamber pop builds into something so much more – Flood is a steady improvement upon her debut.

Pick: ‘This Week’

[jazznoisehere]

Stella Donnelly: Flood (Secretly Canadian, 2022)

Photography By Thomas Hunt   Art Direction: Miles Johnson.

[luuurien]

Stella Donnelly - Flood

(Chamber Pop, Singer/Songwriter, Indie Rock)

A grounder, sober sophomore effort from one of Australia's brightest singer-songwriters, Flood sees Stella Donnelly exploring how we carry ourselves through the world. Looking at the world through new perspectives and providing some of the most vulnerable moments in her discography, Flood's careful storytelling reveals her knack for naturalistic melancholy.

☆☆☆☆

The past few years changed a lot for Stella Donnelly. What rose from the massive success of her barbed 2019 debut Beware of the Dogs, a dark yet witty project that balanced irony and crassness with stories of victim-blaming, abortion, rape culture, climate change and objectification, was three years of touring and distress, every moment spent trying to make sure everything was perfect and exactly how she wanted it to be while all that pressure continued to swallow her every thought. It took rediscovering herself in the silent months she had during Australia's extreme pandemic lockdowns, allowing her breathing room from that past intensity while forcing her to deal with fears and feelings she hadn't up until then. The results come in the form of her Flood, a grounded, sober sophomore effort as she delves into more internal affairs than the worldly struggles of her debut, stories of personal relationship dynamics and the personal tolls of adulthood and the hopelessness that often comes with it. Flood lacks the bombast and bite Beware of the Dogs so often used to its advantage, but by replacing it with softer instrumentals and more intimate writing, Flood succeeds in an entirely new way: by bringing you closer to Donnelly's heart than ever before. Largely written on piano - an instrument she'd barely spent time with - unfamiliarity and understanding are the two biggest drivers of Flood's storytelling and sound. The punky kick of Beware of the Dogs tracks like Tricks and Die are let go of in favor of dreamy indie pop tunes with the occasional chamber kick, lead single Lungs built on little more than a chunky drum groove and bubbly piano leads complete with a thick bassline that holds it all down, the clearer air compared to the anger that hung over her debut making space for songs like the title track and Medals some of her most emotionally resonant yet. It's in how comfortable and secure Donnelly sounds letting her guard down that makes it so easy to love Flood, Restricted Account's aquatic dream built from warped piano and folksy guitar the launch pad for a romantic story with a deliberately unclear direction - at times, it sounds as if her character wants someone who doesn't have much interest in them ("I sent your letter / ...I could be yours if you just call," she sings in the first verse"), but there's such a warmth and comfort in the way she sings "I'll be your lover" in the chorus over Julia Wallace's heavenly flugelhorn and soft layers of throbbing, slightly distorted synths that you can vividly imagine their love in your mind's eye. By design, Flood is less instrumentally thrilling than its predecessor, but the brisk production means her writing can be much more subtle and clever with how she gets her ideas across: How Was Your Day? depicting middle class stress through a "White knuckled mum in the passenger seat" and ..."polite conversation about unclaimed mail" over jangly guitars, Move Me's clever couplets about how we handle shock and fear atop one of the album's most calm instrumentals, Medals' playful takedown of a chaotic, irate roommate with fluffy synths and plucky guitar work. It might take more time than usual for Donnelly's songs to click with you, but Flood is far and away her most rounded body of work to date. The album's naked, extra-vulnerable moments are where we get a side of Donnelly that has only popped up from time to time in the past. Her songs have always dealt with heavy topic matter, but by taking a more internal approach to things this time around, Flood's relaxed composure reveals itself as part of the way she handles sorrow and anger in her life. She drops everything but the piano for Underwater, a cutting five-minute ballad where her harrowing vocal performance and thoughtful songwriting prevent the song from falling into monotony, her story of escaping an abusive relationship buoyed by thick chords and sensitive vocals that drop the rest of Flood's playful tone and help balance the album out with both heavy and lighthearted moments. Donnelly's command of her craft is more apparent here than ever, how she weaves between both the devastating personal vignettes on Morning Silence ("Is it a pipe dream to want my children / Never to wake up and hear a woman screaming") and unique views of the world like the landlord manipulating a working class family through the perspective of their child on Lungs ("And we put up with your shit to keep the power on / ...And I see the way you look at my dad and mum") without them feeling disconnected from one another, Flood's delicate instrumentation and focus on empathy affording her a sense of spirit and meditativeness Beware of the Dogs' hot-headed indie rock didn't take into account. By spend more time with the world around her, by learning to let go of control in favor of letting the world naturally inform her music, Donnelly makes a statement of post-pandemic introspection like nobody else out there. Acutely aware of the world and the way we move ourselves around it, Stella Donnelly no longer needs the iron grip on control that drove her through the past. Instead, she embraces the truths simplicity can unveil and lets the world come to her as it wishes - I'm reminded of the development her Aussie contemporary Courtney Barnett from her rowdy debut to her contemplative sophomore album - and the organic wonder it brings to her music is undeniable. Never before has Donnelly's music felt so alive and present, breathing in fresh air to sing her most thoughtful and fearless songs that carry the pain of the world on their shoulders without succumbing to all the different emotions and visions in front of them. Instead, Donnelly runs through them one by one, letting her heart soak up each idea as long as it needs to so that her music is focused, easygoing, and bursting with energy. It's a risk, opening your heart as wide as she has here, but Flood proves there can still be a place of safety to return to through those journeys of self-discovery. Where she goes next is anyone's guess, but Flood marks a turning point for her as a stronger, matured artist and healing soul, with nothing her songs can't learn to understand and make a connection with. She may carry herself quietly, but Flood's power is undeniable.

[thousandisthemaximum]

I migliori video di giugno

https://www.dlso.it/site/2022/06/30/migliori-video-giugno-2022/

[dancefloors]

what are some good pop albums that were released recently that youve liked/loved? could do with some recs and i trust your opinion (esp after seeing you listen to julia jacklin omg!) <3

hi hiiii, honestly I haven't been as on top of new releases (or anything too far off mainstream) as I have in the past but some 2022 pop listens I can't help crawling back to:

surrender - maggie rogers

glitch princess - yeule

giving the world away - hatchie

flood - stella donnelly

inbred - ethel cain

pre pleasure - julia jacklin (ofc :))

being funny in a foreign language - the 1975

the gods we can touch - aurora

are you happy now? - jensen mccrae

forgiveness - girlpool

I've been slacking so I'm open to reccs too 🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶

[firststarisee]

My Top 100 Albums of 2022

Gang Of Youths - angel in realtime.

The 1975 - Being Funny In A Foreign Language

The Wonder Years - The Hum Goes On Forever

Lizzy Mcalpine - Five Seconds Flat

Everything Everything - Raw Data Feel

Kendrick Lamar - Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers

A Place For Owls - LP1

Bryde - Still

Valleyheart - Heal My Head

Taylor Swift - Midnights

beabadoobee - Beatopia

MUNA - MUNA

Arcade Fire - WE

My Kid Brother - Happy.Mad.Weird.Sad

Birthday Dad - The Hermit

Fatherson - Normal Fears

Kehlani - blue water road

Angel Olsen - Big Time

The Big Moon - HERE IS EVERYTHING

Anna Tivel - Outsiders

Stand Atlantic - f.e.a.r. (Fuck Everything and Run)

The Weeknd - Dawn FM

Noah Cyrus - The Hardest Part

Cold Years - Goodbye to Misery

Tove Lo - Dirt Femme

Carly Rae Jepsen - The Loneliest Time

Graveyard Club - Moonflower

The Midnight - Heroes

Beyoncé - Reniassance

Maggie Rogers - Surrender

Charlie Hickey - Nervous At Night

Lucius - Second Nature

Betty Who - BIG!

Father John Misty - Chloë and the Next 20th Century

Bastile - Give Me The Future/Dreams of The Past

Sudan Archives - Natural Brown Prom Queen

SZA - SOS

Out of Service - The Ground Beneath Me

wrest - End All The Days

Caracara - New Preoccupations

Pale Waves - Unwanted

Death Cab For Cutie - Asphalt Meadows

Camp Trash - The Long Way, The Slow Way

Ryan Adams - Romeo & Juliet

The Smile - A Light for Attracting Attention

The Mountain Goats - Bleed Out

Head and The Heart - Every Shade of Blue

Pinkshift  - Love Me Forever

Coin - Uncanny Valley

King Princess - Hold on Baby

Harry Styles - Harry’s House

Alex the Astronaut - How To Grow A Sunflower Underwater

Coheed & Cambria - Vaxis II: A Window of the Waking Mind

Soccer Mommy - Sometimes, Forever

Tegan and Sara - Crybaby

Bartees Strange - Farm to Table

Momma - Household Name

The Beths - Expert in a Dying Field

Beach Bunny - Emotional Creature

Butch Walker - …As Glenn

Lauv - All 4 Nothing

Skullcrusher - Quiet The Room

Superorganism - World Wide Pop

Drake - Honestly, Nevermind

Martha - Please Don’t Take Me Back

MAITA - I Just Want To Be Wild For You

Tomberlin - i don’t know who needs to hear this…

Companion - Second Day of Spring

Silvana Estrada - Marchita

Sigrid - How to Let Go

BANKS - Serpentina

Future Teens - Self Help

Pinegrove - 11:11

Frank Tuner - FTHC

Stars - From Capelton Hill

Camp Cope - Running with the Hurricane

Dawes - Misadventures Of Doomscroller

Orville Peck - Bronco

Ghostly Kisses - Heaven, Wait

Watkins Family Hour - Vol. II

Ryan Adams - Chris

AURORA - The Gods We Can Touch

Kate Havnevik - Lightship

The Mars Volta - The Mars Volta

Florence + The Machine - Dance Fever

Bad Suns - Apocalypse Whenever

Stella Donnelly - Flood

Courtney Marie Andrews - Loose Future

Vince Staples - RAMONA PARK BROKE MY HEART

SOAK - If I never know you like this again

Hatchie - Giving The World Away

Copeland - Revoling Doors

SYD - Broken Hearts Club

Bjork - Fossora

ROSALÍA - MOTOMAMI

Denzel Curry - Melt My Eyez See Your Future

Pool Kids - Pool Kids

Liss - I Guess Nothing Will Be The Same

Sasha Alex Sloan - I Blame The World

Fickle Friends - Are We Gonna Be Alright?

[becausegoodbye]

my favourite albums of 2022

Cole Pulice – Scry

A tipsily gorgeous collection of electroacoustic experiments, pulse and breath, woodwinds and worms. Saxophone is one of my favourite instruments when played quietly, and one of my least favourite when played loud – and here it's not only soft, but held aloft by beds of gorgeous synthesisers and signal processing and piano: a diamond on a velvet pillow. A cat luxuriantly rolling around in textures. There's a focus and a bliss here, a dreamy pushing of fingers through soil, that I find beautiful and rare.

[Bandcamp]

Stella Donnelly – Flood

I get the sense that some of Stella's fans were disappointed with this album, but I encounter it differently. If you only see it in conversation with Beware of the Dogs, then I can understand it coming across like its paler and more withdrawn cousin, but if you go back to the Thrush Metal EP, the chain of songwriting provenance is clearer, and it's Dogs that starts looking like the outlier. Once you approach it on those terms, Flood reveals itself as a frequently sublime album of chamber pop: an exhale alone over a cup of tea, a wistful gathering of self, and a series of minimalist choices leveraged to maximum effect. The parts that work the least, imo, are when she's trying to be more like Beware of the Dogs (the prime example probably being the odd decision to start the album with the chin-thrust-out drumbeat of 'Lungs', a song that can't keep that up for long before unfolding into the gorgeous soft melodic reverie it really wants to be, and only begrudgingly switching back for the close). Likewise, the parts that work the best are when it's allowed to settle into its own understated catharsis: the devastating hummed suggestions of 'Underwater', for example, or the unknowable clear-eyed kindness of 'Flood', which for me is one of the songs of the year.

[Bandcamp]

lee (asano+ryuhei) – FK_LV

Like a homeless king, magisterial and unafraid, with loose bits hanging off him and a roar like a broken engine. There was a period around 2011-2014 where it felt like lee (asano+ryuhei) released a new album of genius sample-mashing beats every few months, and needing to buy them all was a genuine strain on my budget. Nowadays the pace has slowed, but the albums themselves haven't much; there's a particular vein they mine, and they simply do it better than anyone else. There are moments when all the constituent pieces are clashing in ways that are ugly or incomprehensible, but then they resolve, transcendently, into a wretched and ragged kind of beautiful that you can't quite get anywhere else.

[Bandcamp]

The Beths – Expert in a Dying Field

An absolute corker of an album, spirited and thoughtful and brimming with ideas for making this kind of pop-rock reach above itself. 'Knees Deep' was my most-watched music video this year by a comically large degree – it remains, just, my favourite thing – and when that and the straightforwardly brilliant single 'Expert in a Dying Field' were all that was out, I thought there was a chance that this album would be a genuine all-timer. When it came out and I heard the full album, it wasn't quite consistent enough to reach those heights, but it's still great, with '2am' in particular capping the album off with vulnerable and shambolic verve. Liz Stokes is so skilled at writing lyrics that you only really notice on the third or fourth listen, once they've already worked their way inside you, and a lot of my favourite lines of the year belong to her.

[Bandcamp]

Florist – Florist

"19 tracks that culminate the decade-long journey of friendship and collaboration". Within this overgrown opus lie some of the most gorgeous songs you'll hear, surrounded by the quieter sounds of the people who made them, the place they were made in, and the exploratory muddling sounds of people in place and place in people. Part of me can't help wishing that Florist had reigned it in and made a perfect album – which you could absolutely do here purely with cuts, without needing to add a thing – but I also appreciate the weight of this more fulsome gesture. This is an album that understands music not as a thing that stands separate from the world, but as an enmeshed product of its material and social environment, and it wants everybody – every snail, every leaf – credited.

[Bandcamp]

Horsegirl – Versions by Modern Performance

The influences are written all over this record – it's a reverent restewing of 80s and 90s indie-rock, with the flags of Sonic Youth and the Flying Nun roster flying the highest – but there's a youthful communal vitality that makes it more than that. Even though the vocals are deadpan, the lyrics cryptic, and the sonic palette full of dissonance and dissolution, this is a plainly joyous album. These teenagers from Chicago are having a great time making this. Even before reading about it, I could have told you that there has to be a whole community behind these kids, and a golden thread of that knits itself into every song.

[This music video captures something of it I think]

[Bandcamp]

Time Wharp – Spiro World

Kaye is brilliant, and this spindly gem of an album goes where it wants. In a way, it wears its influences as openly as Horsegirl; they're just so much more all over the place. Here's a dense Steve Reich instrumental pulse; here's a krauty Popol Vuh prog breakdown; here's a tightly-produced Aphex Twin scatterbeat; here's some loose and traipsing piano reminiscent of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. But far more than these by-the-numbers descriptions imply, it's an instrumental album that ultimately feels guided by sensory experience more than anything: how does this feel? how does this feel? how does this feel? Underpinned by the experience of taking feminising hormones (the 'Spiro' of the title refers to spironolactone, and the album's alternative title is One Must First Become Aware Of The Body), it's an album that comes over you as a series of electroacoustic waves, swelling around you in foam, dissolving the distractible mind until you're lifted out of it.

[Bandcamp]

Julia Jacklin – PRE PLEASURE

I liked this album when I first heard it, but it was only after sitting with it for some months that I realised I loved it. The things it succeeds at are all totally familiar – an emotionally vulnerable singer-songwriter, writing songs with lyrically distinct focuses, paced such that they build on each other thematically – but this album succeeds so wholly that it made me remember why lyricists even attempt that kind of thing in the first place. 'Magic' feels infinitely deeper and harder-earned when you've already heard 'Ignore Tenderness'; 'End of a Friendship' hits so much harder when you already know the familial emotional groundline established by 'Less of a Stranger'. Every song is its own perfect short-story universe, but it's only in conversation with the others that the real miracle – the overstory, the impression of the life behind them – takes place. A lot of the music I'm drawn to these days is either instrumental or ambient or otherwise concerned with unsayable truths; it's startling to be reminded of the things we do have to try to say.

All my love is spinning round the room

if only it would land on something soon

but all my words are caught up in a cloud

you know someday you'll have to say it out loud

[Bandcamp]