Stella Donnelly has revealed her new single and video for ‘How Was Your Day?‘, from her forthcoming album Flood, out 26th August on Secretly Canadian.
‘How Was Your Day?’ is a skillful, tuneful song laden with pathos, juxtaposing skippy percussion, glistening guitars and a bright melody with Stella’s deadpan poetic delivery vocals in the verses, that nod back to her superb 2019 debut album, Beware of the Dogs.
“Level-headedness has made way for a disastrous love”, she drops casually. “I know it, you know it.”
Of the track, Donnelly says: “This is my attempt at building a song out of a very specific dynamic between two monogamously involved people. The verses are just excerpts from real conversations, fragments of what two people talk about when they both know they need to have a real talk but neither wants to be the one to bring it up. This song came out of lockdown and seeing a lot of friends break up or get married.”
Directed by Nick Mckk and Claire Giuffre, the ‘How Was Your Day?’ accompanying video is playfully macabre, intercutting shots of soccer games and car wrecks to uncanny effect. “This video does a really good job of portraying how annoying I am!” Donnelly says. “We shot it from opposite sides of the world which was a little bit stressful but a lot of fun.”
Following Beware of the Dogs, Flood is Donnelly’s record of rediscovery; the product of months of risky experimentation, hard moments of introspection, and a lot of transition. It presents Stella in abundance: her inner child, her nurturing self, her nightmare self.
Like the many Banded Stilts that spread across the cover, Donnelly is wading into uncharted territory: learning who she is as an artist and experiencing how prolific an individual can be while thriving in a collective.
“It freshened things up for sure”, Donnelly says, and writing with band members Jennifer Aslett, George Foster, Jack Gaby and Marcel Tussie, felt like a kindergarten play, with co-producers Anna Laverty and Methyl Ethyl’s Jake Webb helping to foster an important spontaneity in the studio. “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! It was quite vulnerable for all of us.”
Flood revels in this. Later this Autumn and winter, Donnelly will embark on a world tour, including stops at Los Angeles, Chicago, Brooklyn, and a plethora of dates across Europe and the UK. Full dates are listed below and tickets are on sale now
Stella Donnelly Tour
November
1st – Wardrobe, Leeds
2nd – Mono, Glasgow
3rd – Band On The Wall, Manchester
4th – Whelan’s, Dublin
6th – Zanzibar, Liverpool
8th – Metronome, Nottingham
9th – Thekla, Bristol
10th – Electric Brixton, London
12th – The Gate, Cardiff
13th – Hare and Hounds, Birmingham
14th – Komedia, Brighton.
