‘Year of Trouble’: Stella Donnelly wants the heart to hit deeper than rock bottom

Posted On October 7, 2025October 7, 2025

I’m currently reading the book My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Mossfegh. In it, the main character essentially seeks to numb herself to the world and sleep for a period of 365 days. If she weren’t fictional, I’m sure she’d resonate with the new single ‘Year of Trouble’ from Stella Donnelly.

Clearly, however, Donnelly’s mood is anything but a literary ruse at this point in time. She is utterly bereft and heartbroken at the loss of her romantic relationship, failing to sum it up in any real optimistic terms and instead branding it a ‘Year of Trouble’. Yes, the outlook is bleak. And the bad news is, it doesn’t ever really look up at all from that utter pit of devastating despair. 

The Australian singer has been frank about this very blank drawing board being the crux of inspiration for the track, taken from her upcoming album Love and Fortune, which is set to be released on November 7th via Brace Yourself Records. “This one is all heart no ego, all pain no gain,” she explained, speaking of ‘Year of Trouble’. “I originally tried to make this a dance-floor heartbreak but I was being too ambitious and overthinking it. I just needed to play it by myself.”

The concept of this song ever being built on the foundations of “dance-floor heartbreak” is genuinely absurd, given how bare and stripped back the eventual product turned out to be. With large portions of the track backed up by merely a few notes on a piano, the idea of someone being at their lowest possible ebb is essentially rammed down your throat until you suffocate in the misery.

In this sense, through no fault of the listener, it’s perhaps easy to clock out of this song if you’re not tuning your ears intently. It’s a few notes, a couple of repeated melodies. Essentially, it gets a little bit monotonous. Only for the final 30 seconds of the song, when it crescendos into a fuller and more dynamic orchestration, do you really feel the punch of that emotional flow. It’s still depression, but ultimately without the numbness. 

Of course, no one is lost to the fact that this whole effect is pretty much the point. ‘Year of Trouble’ is diving deeper than your darkest thoughts, hitting rock bottom and still continuing to tunnel through the deepest roots of the Earth. But, without attempting to sound blasé, it’s a heartbreak song. This is nothing new. Writing a song about the worst moments of your life being based on the ending of a relationship is hardly reinventing the wheel, meaning the lyrics, such as “I’m undressed, paperless, filter gone/ Wading through life with you on my phone”, aren’t exactly awe-inspiring. 

This is not to be construed as an attack on Donnelly for approaching the subject of heartbreak. Everyone has done it, and will continue to do it as long as the world still spins. But painting the starkest depths of pain somehow doesn’t quite ring true on a matter we’ve heard rehashed so many times before. If you want to truly spear the audience in the heart, think of a new way to deliver that crushing blow.

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