Intimate, immersive, beautiful: Is this the best Australian album of the year?

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Plus, the other local music releases you need to hear this month.

By Tom W. Clarke, Nick Buckley and Robert Moran

November 8, 2025 — 5.30am

Stella Donnelly, Love and Fortune

You push gently through the scrub and wander along the bush path. You can just glimpse the blue sky through the canopy of towering gumtrees, sun streaming through spiderwebs and glistening off a little creek. Sticks crack beneath your feet, birds tweet a soft symphony. You emerge at a pool, still and silent, clear and deep. The water whispers to you, nature’s secrets reveal themselves, and you feel cleansed and awakened.

This is the feeling of listening to Love and Fortune, the third album by Australian singer-songwriter Stella Donnelly. It’s swimming out past the waves, fear giving way to wonder. It’s standing on the edge of a cliff, then spotting whales in the distance. It’s a profound and deeply assured record by an artist who found her way back to the surface after being briefly swallowed by the deep.

The singer-songwriter’s third album was inspired by a painful breakup from a friend.

Love and Fortune is the most beautiful and gripping Australian album of 2025: disarmingly intimate and utterly immersive, a late-night conversation with your best friend that simply cannot end until the sun comes up.

This is an album about endings. Break-ups, yes, but more universally the disappointments, messiness, fear and cautious optimism that accompany any chapter closing and another slowly opening. And so it’s appropriate that the first song on the record is Standing Ovation, the end at the beginning. It’s a mesmerising opener, soft and slow and powerful; Donnelly’s crystalline voice against isolated piano chords holds you entranced from the first note, before jangly guitar breaks the spell and propels things forward.

Donnelly channels pain into exquisitely rendered, achingly real paeans to heartbreak, big songs that find poetry in specificity: the fizzing resentment of Feel It Change (“I kept your furniture for sentiment, never reminded me of anything”); the redolent piano ballad Year of Trouble (“My belly aches whenever I hear your name in a crowd”); the feeling of finding yourself after burning out on W.A.L.K. (“I set myself on fire for someone else’s game”); the sardonic irony of the title track (“This will grow you … Buy my new book and I’ll show you”).

But it’s in the smaller moments that the album truly shines. Moments of intense intimacy, like the quiet stillness of Baths – less than two minutes long and sung almost entirely a cappella, as if sitting across from Donnelly at a dwindling campfire. Or Friend, which feels like the pages of a journal entry being slowly burned away. This is Stella inviting you into her confidence, her soul laid bare, her innermost thoughts shared with you and only you.

And the skeleton key to it all is Please Everyone, the softly swirling central piece. This is an album about endings. But really it’s an exercise in self-forgiveness, in processing grief and purging demons, loosening the grip of life’s burdens and finding oneself somewhere in the chaos and claustrophobia of it all.

It’s nostalgic, with a watchful eye towards a brighter (or, at least, lighter) future, sparkling introspection with glimmers of hope. The world can be loud and unforgiving, but in the quiet there is release, acceptance, love, fortune. Tom W. Clarke

WILSN, Bloom

When artists attempt faithful interpretations of decades-old musical genres it can too often result in an awkward temporal pastiche. But when it hits right – as it does on Naarm singer WILSN’s second album, Bloom – the music can be transportive.

WILSN (aka Shannon Busch) allows her astounding voice to naturally carry her back through the decades with each new album, this time to 1960s analogue tape recordings. A support slot for the late soul star Charles Bradley led to Busch recording Bloom in Brooklyn with Bradley’s trumpet player and horn arranger Billy Aukstik, as well as musicians who’ve played with Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, Mark Ronson and Jalen Ngonda.

At a dark time in the world, Bloom is an opening to connect with whatever nurturing your heart needs, to revel in the power of the human voice as a soothing treatment for sorrow, or as an enveloping expression of love. WILSN is hands-down one of the best vocalists in the country and manages to find new layers of character to her voice with each release. For the love of god, just listen to her sing. Nick Buckley

HighSchool, HighSchool

It’s a touch mystical that HighSchool release their debut album at a time when Joy Division is bizarrely dominating the Australian cultural conversation. Because the Melbourne-bred, London-based duo of Rory Trobbiani and Luke Scott brood and spike in the manner of Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, et al. If Anthony Albanese was really on it, he’d be rocking their T-shirt to his next international summit.

The pair’s sound nostalgically harks back to an era when guitars were called “angular” and black leather jackets were necessary stage attire. On the highlight Sony Ericsson, Trobbiani sings in a disaffected Julian Casablancas-esque drawl, while guitars weave and chime, a dusty drumbeat stutters, and film samples add to a drenched mood that’s as black as my coffee.

It’s Gothy but there’s a unique local touch to the band’s anglophile sound, as though the eyeliner’s dripping in our summer heat. This is post-punk for outdoorsy kids. Furnished with shit-talk chatter layered underneath thick, melodic bass, Making Out at the Skatepark manages to evoke exactly that, while Best and Fairest, built on warm and elegiac synths, might be the most romantic ode to junior Aussie Rules football you’ll ever hear. This one’s a goal. Robert Moran

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