Smiling contentedly, Stella Donnelly surveys the crowd in front of her. “I feel like I’ve met all of you at some point before,” she says, laughing. You believe her. Before emigrating to Australia at the age of nine, the 27-year-old singer-songwriter grew up in south Wales. She stays true to her word and treats tonight’s crowd as her own, intermittently waving back at them, asking for beer recommendations and attempting to converse like a local. “That was lush, diolch!” she says after one song. Put her adopted Perthian twang aside and it’s almost as if she never left.
Donnelly exudes this everyday, easy charm while she plays, too. This works best on Mosquito, one of the finer takes from her debut album, this year’s Beware of the Dogs. “I use my vibrator wishing it was you,” she sings, delicately but without hesitation, over breezy guitar lines.
She continues to tenderly fingerpick her way through the evening, shining throughout the confident kiss-off of Old Man and later, Tricks – a jaunty, playful poke at an Australian nationalist – bouncing over slightly saccharine synths from her supporting four-piece band.
She has a gentle vibrato that carries her songs well, though sometimes you yearn for her to lean into a rawer, more guttural delivery: Boys Will Be Boys – an unapologetically stark takedown of victim-blaming culture – is the only song to receive such treatment.
Always looking out for her audience, Donnelly provides a content warning beforehand, but her breathy, quietly threatening repetitions of the chorus – “They said, boys will be boys / Deaf to the word ‘no’” – deserve to be heard beyond the venue’s PA. The songs are much like the woman herself: funny, visceral and vital.
• At Bristol Thekla, 24 April. Then touring the UK until 7 May.
