With her debut album ‘Nothing to Be Scared Of’ on the horizon, Melbourne indie folk artist Stella Dunai celebrates friendship, impermanence, and the quiet courage it takes to open yourself up to something new.
Stream: “Move on!” – Stella Dunai
Maybe making friends as an adult isn’t quite as complicated as we make it.
There is something wonderfully uncomplicated about the childhood ritual of walking up to another kid on the playground, saying your name, and deciding – sometimes within minutes – that you are now friends. Somewhere along the way, adulthood adds hesitation. We wonder whether we are bothering someone, whether they will like us, whether a connection will last long enough to justify making it in the first place.
Melbourne-based indie folk artist Stella Dunai wants to reclaim a little of that childhood abandon. Her latest single, “Move on!,” is a warm, exuberant celebration of the people who move through our lives and leave pieces of themselves behind. Following “I Love You Too Eagerly,” the track finds Dunai exploring adult friendship not through melancholy over its impermanence, but through gratitude for the ways even fleeting connections can change us. Built from joyful acoustic guitars, rich vocal harmonies, and playfully layered instrumentation, “Move on!” feels appropriately alive – messy, affectionate, and constantly in motion.
That messiness is intentional, even if Dunai didn’t initially realize just how closely the arrangement mirrored the song’s subject. Beginning with a repetitive nylon-string guitar and melody, she gradually added overlapping parts that resemble several people talking at once, alongside playful vocal ad-libs that transform the song into what she affectionately calls a “big joyful loud mess.” There is even a particularly fitting cameo at its end: the voices belong to Dunai and her best friend Zoe, whom she met 23 years ago in kindergarten.
It is a tiny detail that encapsulates much of what “Move on!” is about. Not every relationship will last 23 years. It doesn’t need to.
As Dunai has grown older, she has learned to loosen her grip on the idea that every friendship needs to become permanent.
Some are short; others serious, fun, meaningful, or enduring. Allowing all of them to exist on their own terms, she says, has made her life feel richer.
That philosophy extends beyond “Move on!” Dunai is currently approaching another enormous act of letting herself be known: the release of her debut solo album, Nothing To Be Scared Of, due later this year.
Some listeners may already know her as the frontwoman of Australian electronic-soul six-piece Empress, but her solo work occupies a markedly different world. Drawing inspiration from artists including Adrianne Lenker, Haley Heynderickx, Alice Phoebe Lou, and Laura Marling, Dunai builds intimate indie folk from acoustic textures, dreamy melodies, and the small emotional moments that often reveal themselves to be much larger than they first appeared.
Having complete creative control has also allowed her to venture further inward. Dunai describes writing for Empress almost as inhabiting another voice or character; her solo project, meanwhile, has given her room to explore subjects that would feel too personal for such a collaborative environment. That freedom is rewarding, but it comes with vulnerability. “It feels so vulnerable in a way I haven’t experienced before,” she admits.
Nothing To Be Scared Of embraces that vulnerability from several directions. Its songs examine romantic and platonic relationships, family, grief, and Dunai’s evolving relationship with herself. Three songs are dedicated to her late grandmother Marion, each approaching the loss from another perspective: Dunai as an adult, Dunai as a child, and her grandfather.
In fact, it is “Marion” that gives the album its title. The words nothing to be scared of were originally written from her grandfather’s perspective as a source of comfort to her grandmother as she was dying. Over time, however, Dunai realized they could offer another kind of reassurance – to herself.
Her debut album represents years spent wondering whether she was talented or capable enough to make something like it at all.
Now those same words accompany her into whatever comes next: releasing deeply personal music, running toward love, grieving it, surviving heartbreak, stepping into unfamiliar rooms, and meeting the strangers waiting inside them.
Recently, one of those unfamiliar rooms happened to be in Paris. Dunai played her first international show there to a packed audience of people she didn’t know – an experience she describes as surreal and unexpectedly fitting for the spirit of “Move on!” The trip left her eager to spend more time overseas, build new creative relationships, and discover what kind of music might emerge from placing herself in unfamiliar spaces. Perhaps that is the thread connecting everything Stella Dunai is creating right now. Connection requires accepting uncertainty. You cannot know when you introduce yourself to somebody whether they will become a passing acquaintance or the best friend whose voice appears on your song 23 years later. You cannot know what a room full of strangers on the other side of the world will think of your music. And you cannot know whether something frightening will eventually become the experience that teaches you who you are.Sometimes, you simply have to introduce yourself anyway.
In conversation with Atwood Magazine, Stella Dunai opens up about adult friendship, embracing impermanence, finding her voice outside of Empress, taking her music overseas, and the deeply personal story behind her forthcoming debut album, Nothing To Be Scared Of.
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:: stream/purchase Move on! here ::
:: connect with Stella Dunai here ::
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Stream: “Move on!” – Stella Dunai
A CONVERSATION WITH STELLA DUNAI
Atwood Magazine: “Move on!” celebrates the idea that people can enter our lives for different lengths of time and still leave something meaningful behind. Has your understanding of friendship and impermanence changed as you’ve gotten older?
Stella Dunai: Yes! It definitely has, I think the older I get the more I appreciate and accept different relationships and friendships for what they are. I think I held on too tight to some friendships when I was younger, instead letting some be short, some be meaningful, some be fun, some serious and some be long and close. It feels actually so much richer to have a range of different connections, they all can teach you something different.
I love the image you use of adult friendship still containing some of the innocence and silliness of making a friend on the playground. Do you think adulthood sometimes teaches us to overcomplicate connection – and was there something freeing about returning to that childlike perspective in “Move on!”?
Stella Dunai: I think it definitely can! There are so many times in my experience of adulthood through things like solo travel, moving into houses with strangers, changing schools/uni, joining new bands etc. where I have had the opportunity to put myself out there in front of complete strangers. And it feels a bit silly and awkward, like a little kid just going up to a stranger in the playground and just telling them their name, but it really is that simple sometimes and I’ve found people are more receptive than you might think. After getting past the anxiety that that can cause, I actually quite enjoy it, and I have found some of the most rewarding and beautiful connections through that kind of meeting. So although some connections are complicated, and long-term closer relationships are something that you need to maintain and put effort into, I think the act of introducing yourself, and opening yourself up to the possibility of knowing someone is still quite simple, and that can definitely be overcomplicated or shied away from in adulthood.
There’s an interesting contrast between the title “Move on!,” which could easily suggest heartbreak or leaving someone behind, and how joyful and affectionate the song actually is. What made those words feel right for a song about friendship and the ways people shape us?
Stella Dunai: When writing the song, I was thinking of how all these people and connections around me are shaping me, and how we are all taking pieces of each other, and of course what comes along with that is also shedding some of the old pieces. It felt to me like this constant chaotic forward movement and change, so the title ‘Move on!’ felt fitting. But to be honest I do think it is a bit of a confusing/misleading title without that context, it just became such a part of the song that I had to leave it like that!
“Move on!” sounds wonderfully light and free, with those layered acoustic guitars and warm harmonies. When you were building the arrangement, how did you translate that feeling of new friendship into the actual sound of the song?
Stella Dunai: The song stemmed originally from just the repetitive nylon string guitar part and the melody, which are already quite janky and chaotic sounding by themselves. I think it just made sense to layer more overlapping, weaving and winding parts over the top, like a bunch of different people talking at the same time, making it a big joyful loud mess! In the vocals I added lots of silly ad-lib parts in the background, again like a group of people all talking and having fun. I wasn’t consciously thinking of the arrangement as encapsulating the feeling of friendship but I guess it just naturally called for this kind of layering, and it’s unsurprising that while thinking of my friends I made a messy, warm, chaotic, silly song, because those three words describe perfectly what a lot of my friendships feel like to me. And as a sidenote the voices you hear talking at the end are me and my best friend Zoe who I met 23 years ago in kindergarten!
Your previous single “I Love You Too Eagerly” and “Move on!” both explore connection, but from quite different emotional places. As you move toward your debut album Nothing To Be Scared Of, what kinds of relationships or versions of yourself have you found yourself returning to in your writing?
Stella Dunai: I think my upcoming album deals with love and connection from quite a few different viewpoints. It touches on platonic and romantic connections, family, grief, and finding your sense of self. I guess it covers connection to others and yourself in an overarching sense and it moves through a range of different perspectives and versions of me, there isn’t a particular one that I feel like I keep returning to. But there are some clear themes that I do return to. For example, three songs on the album are about the loss of my grandma Marion, who I was very close to growing up. Each of them are about her but from a different viewpoint, one from my perspective as an adult, one from the perspective of me as a little kid and one from my grandad’s perspective.
You’ve spoken about wanting your music to offer listeners the same joy, comfort, and language for difficult feelings that your favourite artists have given you. Can you remember a song or artist that first made you realise music could do that for you?
Stella Dunai: I think music has always been so emotionally regulating and comforting to me, even in my days as a kid and young teen listening to artists like Hannah Montana and Mika! But I think the first artist that really comes to mind for this question is Adrienne Lenker. Her music is just so tender and has such a power over me! There is something about it that just feels right in a way that I can’t describe, the feeling that she is trying to evoke in so many of her songs is so familiar and genuine to me, even where the lyrics are indecipherable/confusing if I were to read them literally.
Listeners may also know you as the frontwoman of Empress. What have you discovered about your own creative instincts by stepping into a solo project, where the songs and storytelling can belong so specifically to your perspective?
Stella Dunai: It’s been such a learning journey to have a project that is completely mine. The music of Empress is so vastly different to my own, so it really does feel like I am writing with a different voice, or as a different character. It has been interesting to unveil what music sounds like when I have full creative control, and it’s allowed me to really dive deep into personal topics in my writing, topics that would feel like too much to bring to such a collaborative project like Empress. That aspect has been so rewarding for me, but also quite scary, it feels so vulnerable in a way I haven’t experienced before. All of that being, said I don’t prefer one over the other, they are both so different and I am just grateful to have two great outlets for my creativity.
Your songwriting draws from artists like Adrianne Lenker, Haley Heynderickx, Alice Phoebe Lou, and Laura Marling, all of whom can make very small or ordinary moments feel enormous. What attracts you to that kind of intimate storytelling, and how do you know when an everyday moment contains a song?
Stella Dunai: I think I am someone who does view the world through an emotional, sensitive lens (often too much maybe) so I guess that kind of framing feels good to me, and it feels familiar, even affirming to hear other artists frame things like that too. I honestly don’t have a method to my process of writing a song, I would love to tell you that I have specific practices in noticing things and turning them into a song but honestly most of the time I have no idea what I am doing and I don’t even realise myself that a small moment has had such an impact on me until it just comes out and starts making sense in a song.
You’ve been spending time in the UK and Europe and recently performed in Paris. Has being away from Melbourne changed the way you think about home, creativity, or the kinds of connections you want to make through music?
Stella Dunai: Playing my first international show to a packed out room of people I don’t know in Paris was so surreal (and unexpected to be honest!!). It was so interesting to see the gig scene on the other side of the world, and meet a bunch of new people in spaces I have never been in (much in the spirit of “Move on!”). I am definitely interested in spending more time overseas and exploring the music opportunities over there, I think I have barely scratched the surface. Experiencing just a tiny bit of what is out there overseas made me eager to return and uncover more, meet more people and makes me curious to what kind of music would come out of those connections and from being in those spaces for a longer time. That being said, I am also very grateful to return to the people and family here. It’s a very lucky problem to have, to have exciting things and connections here and on the other side of the world. I will definitely be back over there at some point, I am just not sure of when that will be.
With Nothing To Be Scared Of arriving later this year, what does that title mean to you now – and what do you hope listeners understand about Stella Dunai by the time they reach the end of your debut album?
Stella Dunai: I took the album title from the song “Marion,” that I wrote for my Grandma. That’s the song that I wrote from my grandad’s perspective, and in that context it was meant to be a comfort to her as she was passing away. But I thought it was fitting for the album as a whole as it connects to the other songs too in a different way. This is my first album, and the work of many, many years of being scared that I am not capable or talented enough to achieve something like this, so it also works as something to tell myself in this release and in my career/life going forward. I have a song called ‘Somersault’ that speaks to that feeling. I think it also connects to the way that this album touches on romantic connection, running into love, going through grief, being hurt by love, throwing yourself into new spaces and connecting with new people.
In writing these songs, releasing such personal music, and having all these experiences that I sing about, it is a comfort that I am through them, I survived, and I have learnt so much even if it was through something painful, I guess through that I am feeling more and more sure in myself. Of course I have no idea what will come and lots of things out in the world/in our future are genuinely scary, but in the context of this snapshot of my life and these songs it makes sense to me. I do hope that the people listening will understand these songs in the context of their own lives, and if they take something meaningful, or get a feeling that feels affirming or familiar, even if they take something completely different from these songs, then I am still very happy with that.
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There is a lovely contradiction at the center of Nothing To Be Scared Of: Dunai isn’t claiming that there is literally nothing left to fear.
Quite the opposite. She readily acknowledges that she doesn’t know what comes next and that plenty about the future genuinely is frightening. The title instead feels like something softer – a reassurance earned by looking backward and realizing that the things she once feared have already been lived through. Love happened. Grief happened. Hearts broke. New people appeared. She made the songs anyway. “I survived, and I have learnt so much even if it was through something painful,” Dunai reflects.
And maybe “Move on!” contains a smaller version of the same idea. Dunai has learned that moving forward doesn’t necessarily mean leaving people behind. We carry pieces of one another with us. Some friendships last decades; others occupy a single season. Both can alter the person who continues onward. For now, Dunai is doing exactly that: moving forward, opening herself to unfamiliar places and people, and discovering what happens when she trusts herself enough to follow them.
There may always be something to be scared of. The beautiful part is doing it anyway.
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:: stream/purchase Move on! here ::
:: connect with Stella Dunai here ::
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Stream: “Move on!” – Stella Dunai
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