STELLA DONNELLY Love and Fortune (Dot Dash/Remote Control) — Stella Donnelly needed a break. That’s understandable, surely. The Australia-based singer-songwriter garnered enough attention with her 2022 sophomore album, Flood, to tour across the globe. By her own accounting, she came back from the whirlwind feeling worn out and with fresh doubts about whether music making was the right professional path for her. The quality of her new release, Love and Fortune, plainly argues that she’s on the right track, even as her misgivings are laced throughout the album. Donnelly is a sharp songwriter with a keen sense of melody. The songs here have a drifty quality, as if she’s finding her way with care. “Year of Trouble” is tender like a lullaby, and “Being Nice” lilts as if looking for a safe place to land. The edges are present, though honed by wisdom. When, on “Feel It Change,” Donnelly sings “I love you baby but I’m scared to be near you,” the vulnerability is captivating and heart-rending at once. Because Donnelly mostly stays in the same general tone, it’s especially striking when she expands the sound a bit, as on “Laying Low,” which is like Saint Etienne with a folksy bent. Here’s to hoping that Donnelly is back for good. Embrace the following cuts: “Baths,” “W.A.L.K.,” and “Ghosts.”

SHARP PINS Balloon Balloon Balloon (K/Perennial) — Just a few months after Kai Slater slung his guitar with Lifeguard on the fantastic album Ripped and Torn, the precocious Chicagoan is back with the solo project Sharp Pins and a new record that packs twenty-one tracks into less than forty-five minutes. That’s efficiency. If there’s a little bit of the perpetual Guided By Voices issue with a handful of songs on the album that feel like half-finished ideas that Slater went ahead and released anyway, the defiant retro stylings of the material go a long way towards making the lack of culling feel somewhat appropriate. It’s conceivable that exhuming a clasped-up box of decades-old 45s from the corner of a basement would yield forgotten tunes that sound just like “I Don’t Have the Heart,” “Talking in Your Sleep,” and, well, pick any two or three others at random. Parts of Balloon Balloon Balloon call to mind specific predecessors — “Gonna Learn to Crawl” and “Maria Don’t” both sound like a burned-out Beach Boys — but Sharp Pins mostly sounds like the whole of nineteen-sixties rock hardened into a modern diamond. When “I Could Find Out” goes dark and sputters out like a jalopy or “(In a While) You’ll Be Mine” vibrates into a psychedelic fuzz out, Slater steps forward as the guy carrying the torch for all his rocker ancestors. In addition to those already mentioned, the following tracks really pop: “(I Wanna) Be Your Girl,” “Fall in Love Again,” and “Takes So Long.”