Like the many Banded Stilts that spread across the cover of her newest album Flood, Stella Donnelly is wading into uncharted territory. Here, she finds herself discovering who she is as an artist among the flock, and how abundant one individual can be. Flood is Donnelly’s record of this rediscovery: the product of months of risky experimentation, hard moments of introspection, and a lot of moving around.

Her early reflections on the relationship between the individual and the many can be traced back to Donnelly’s time in the rainforests of Bellingen, where she took to birdwatching as both a hobby and an escape in a border-restricted world. By paying closer attention to the natural world around her, she recalls “I was able to lose that feeling of anyone’s reaction to me. I forgot who I was as a musician, which was a humbling experience of just being; being my small self.”

Reconnecting with the ‘small self’ allowed Donnelly to tap into creative wells she didn’t know existed. Soon songs were coming to her in a way she could not control and over the coming months, Donnelly accumulated 43 tracks as she moved out of Bellingen and around the country, often finding herself displaced due to border restrictions, a tough rental market, and once from the joys of finding black mould in the walls.

“I had so many opportunities to write things in strange places,” Donnelly remarks, having passed through Fremantle, Williams, Guilderton, Margaret River and Melbourne. “I often had no choice about where I was. There’s no denying that not being able to access your family with border closures, it zooms in on those parts of your life you care about.”

With new locations came new approaches. “It freshened things up for sure,” Donnelly says, and writing with band members Jennifer Aslett, George Foster, Jack Gaby and Marcel Tussie, soon began to feel like kindergarten play. “They all brought themselves to the record in such a beautiful way. A lot of us were playing instruments that weren’t our first instrument: me on piano, Jack doing all these synth sounds, George trying a bunch of stuff out, Marcel sang! We were all like ‘plink plonk’; it was quite vulnerable for all of us.”

Along with the support of her band members, co-producing the record beside Anna Laverty and Methyl Ethyl’s Jake Webb helped to foster an important spontaneity in the studio. With Webb, Donnelly could “dig in” and discover a “forward-leaning sound” she’d been searching for, while Laverty’s ability to “capture the piano” and discern the “perfect take” allowed the songwriter to take further risks.

Straying from the easier option of writing on an electric guitar, Donnelly’s move to piano imbues her new work with a fluidity and vulnerability that befits the record’s introspective nature. Donnelly had not played much piano – what she fondly calls “a very easy instrument to fuck up” – since her early childhood and there was something wonderfully playful and poignant about climbing back up onto the piano stool and finding her fingers. Flood revels in this.

In “Restricted Account”, the piano quietly dances back and forth with her vocals, while the warmth of the fluegelhorn blooms above; piano again drives the band along in “Move Me” as the understated horn returns and Donnelly later aptly sings, “You’re the bit that holds us all together”. These patterns flicker across the record, dispelling any fears of the record turning out disjointed from its origin story. Much of the album is ultimately united by Donnelly’s intuitive songwriting, where listeners can expect commanding assertive verses, euphoric shimmery choruses and killer bridges; and just when you think you really know what to expect, something alien will arrive: the offspring of the band’s “plink plonking”.

Subverting expectations and keeping people on their toes has long been a strategy of the ‘firstborn’ in Donnelly. “I can’t sit on something for too long,” she laughs, “it’s an oldest child thing: you strive to entertain; you’ve got to fight for your spot to keep someone engaged.” The child’s fight for their spot at the table, both in and out of the home, appears throughout Flood in different personas; one offers a bold exclamation about being a child the rest of her life, while another grapples over whether to wear or throw away her beads from when she was five. In “Morning Silence”, one declares “Same old fight was had today / Great grandchild will see the same.”

Throughout the record, Donnelly looks back at history and wonders where she’s come from and where she’ll go next. In opener “Lungs” we hear her plead, “History again teach me like a friend what you know and why,” and this curiosity extends into many of the songs exploring relationships, be them familial, romantic or platonic.

“I do love observing human dynamics,” Donnelly says. “Dynamics between old best friends, or dynamics between housemates, or a relationship where the two people are broken up and haven’t spoken in years. I like getting into the mind of someone who we’ve all been at some point.” This interest expresses itself in a unique way on the record as Donnelly regularly ‘plays dress-up’, adopting different faces and personas to help her distill her truest self. In “Lungs” she writes from the point of view of a child whose family has just been evicted, while “Flood” invites us to look through the eyes of someone dating Donnelly, with lyrics frank and at times damning.

Looking back at the Banded Stilt, Donnelly ultimately appreciates how when “seen in a crowd they create an optical illusion, but on its own it’s this singular piece of art.” While each song on Flood is a singular artwork unto itself, the collective shares all of Stella Donnelly in abundance: her inner child, her nurturing self, her nightmare self; all of herself has gone into the making of this record, and although it would take an ocean to fathom everything she feels, it’s well worth diving in.

When Maria BC is singing, they feel as though they’re dissolving and soaring, all at once. Hyaline, the title of their debut full-length album, describes something that is clear and translucent like glass, especially a smooth sea. For the Ohio-born, Oakland, CA-based artist, songwriting is a stretched blank canvas awaiting the strokes of an exhale, and it’s this slow-moving process that rewards us the ease of a crystalline sky, without forgetting the clouds that may have come before it. A knife’s-edge balance of intimacy and ambiguity, Hyaline accesses snapshots of grief, anxiety and wonder through a miscellany of specters: these are ghost stories, but not as we know them.

Growing up, Maria BC often found solace in spending time alone. They learned how to entertain themselves creatively, and the childhood practice of songwriting still deeply affects how they associate with music today. “It makes me cherish and revel in moments of being totally alone,” they explain. It’s through this sustained, quiet process that they learned they could access characters, or certain selves, when singing. Through the lens of a character, there came a safety in exploring topics that may otherwise be too painful or humiliating. Here, Maria BC can name the grief that stands outside oneself, and in doing so, turns a haunted shadow into something more tactile.

Opener “No Reason” evokes a hairpin bend, an epiphany, where a new character upends the daily lives of those who didn’t expect it. It’s a call to attention, a curtain raise. Elsewhere, “The Only Thing” brims with the full, effervescent, sun-is-coming-up feeling of new love, while the haunting strums of “Betelgeuse” investigates one’s role as a victim and the inescapable generational pull of familial patterns. “Good Before,” a song Maria BC wrote while on a highway drive watching the sun rise, showcases the songwriter’s pop sensibilities and their spur-of-the-moment magic. Later, “The Big Train” proves the power in simply naming something to lessen its weight, but this doesn’t necessarily mean it will provide an answer. It tells the story of a man haunted by his past mistakes, sauntering through darkness, before hearing the sound of a train the following morning. Darkness doesn’t have to be scary, or evil – it can be the seed under the soil, waiting to bloom between the cracks of concrete. Closer “Hyaline” encompasses this kind of hopeful attitude, where each character throughout the album sees a friend, or a lover, calling out to them. “I’m trying to beat down this individualist impulse that sometimes comes with creating a piece of art.”

It’s this power of reframing, of shaping our hardest citations, that alerts us to the present force of Hyaline. Citing poet Louise Gluck, Maria BC was inspired by the notion of the dreamer and the watcher archetypes. “The dreamer is always looking towards a future that can never happen, but the watcher is effectively present,” they say. “The way I can become more of a watcher is by putting it into music.”

This awareness can be felt in the loose, minimal arrangements of Hyaline. Unlike 2021’s debut EP Devil’s Rain where they recorded in one room, careful not to disturb their roommates or neighbors, Maria BC created Hyaline all across their untreated apartment while previously living in Brooklyn, like a wandering spirit gaining energy from different spaces. Their classically-trained mezzo-soprano voice soars over raw, etherial guitars; audio samples from Prospect Park – now almost unrecognizable – dapple across minimal percussion; organ, played by Maria BC’s dad at his church in Ohio, settle alongside tender, transformative harmonies. Mixing together different sessions, tracks recorded directly into their phone and samples collected over the years, Maria BC likens Hyaline to a “sonic collage.” It’s a project of patience, and trusting the process.

Hyaline is a lesson in slowness, in clear nothingness. Actively opposing the way in which music is commodified into playlists that match our moods, or to promote productivity, Maria BC instead chooses to draw things out and see where they land. By allowing each song to breathe, to build slowly and gradually, Hyaline invites curiosity and imagination to blossom in a world of snap-reactions. Here, Maria BC encourages us to put reasons aside, to stop searching for answers and instead, indulge in the fantasy of it all. “Let the world wash over you,” they say, “rather than try to pin it to one single thing.”