UPC: 0098787163506 Almost as soon as Stella Chronopoulou began writing Adagio , her fifth album as Stella, she knew the time had finally come to sing in Greek, her native tongue. It would be a first. She started the record almost by accident in 2019, during an 11-hour boat ride to the island of Anafi. Stella had recently gone through a patch of personal turmoil and needed a break from home. On the ferry, she pulled out her cell phone as the boat clipped through the Mediterranean and began with a simple melody, steadily piecing together a rough instrumental. As psychedelic keyboards twinkled and swayed above staccato drums, the track suggested some deep exhalation, as if Stella were letting go of long-unnecessary baggage. For a spell, she set the instrumental aside. She wasn't ready yet, or in a rush. Stella, after all, grew up in a slow place. During her youth in a relatively rural suburb of Athens, Greece, she and her friends played unfettered in empty streets, not worried about cars or permission, and living felt easy. But in the last decade life has steadily become busier for Stella, now based in the heart of Athens. She has become one of modern Greece's most popular musical exports, with three sophisticated, playful pop albums rendered with international elan. After her Sub Pop debut, Up and Away, in 2022, she catapulted beyond three million monthly Spotify listeners. That success was a blessing, but Stella sometimes found herself pining for the slower pace of her youth. That longing is the thread that loosely binds together her fifth album, the entrancing Adagio . Borrowing its name from the term for music that's meant to be played slowly, Adagio is a pop record that feels like a very warm blanket, its nylon-string guitars and featherlight percussion swaddling its listeners for three minutes at a time. Written and recorded over the span of five years, with a consortium of international collaborators including !!!'s Rafael Cohen and British songwriter G...