“Each song carries a different place in that journey for me,” she says. “To me, this record is probably the closest I’ve come to making… almost a musical. It’s really not a musical, but it feels like that to me.” Ethereal, elusive synths interweave with melancholic live strings, jumping to dream-pop guitars and Euro rave climaxes blunted by distorted percussion—it’s Stel’s sound at its most ambitious and assured yet. Its themes—of turbulent relationships and meandering life paths, toxic patterns and the euphoria found in everyday moments—are expressed with diaristic intimacy.
The first song she made was the hypnotic “Like A Kite,” written around a year ago and almost abandoned after she got stuck on its second verse. “The feeling has to hit,” she says. “Often I’ll try to write about something and make 10 songs, and then one will be the one where I feel like I’ve finally captured it.” It became one of the record’s throbbing arteries, with its body-high bass and vulnerable lines about giving into curious new feelings.
Her instincts mattered more than ever, as this is the first record Stel has made while knowing people are really waiting to hear it. “My first project, no one was listening,” she says. Her second was already finished before Object Permanence began gaining traction. “I didn’t yet feel perceived. This project, I felt so perceived when I started making it.” Her response was to become more stubborn about following her own taste. “You get so lost as soon as you start trying to guess what people want.”
Instead, she tests songs on the people who knew her before all of this: her brothers (Luke and Royce) and closest friends. “They’re probably the only people whose opinions I really allow to touch the music,” she says, noticing which tracks they ask to hear again or linger around to listen to while she works. Across the last few weeks, she’s been testing new songs like the neon-synth-inflected, anthemic “Molly In The Club” on her crowds. “People know the lyrics already,” she says, smiling wickedly, “but I love them even more when they’re pretending to know them. I know the trick! Mouthing ‘watermelon.’”
Stel’s perfectionism is reserved almost entirely for music. “I never thought of myself that way until my girlfriend pointed it out—I’m trying to let go a little more,” she admits. She still uses the same microphone she found eight years ago and has spent years refining the processing on her distinctive alto. “I use tuning as an instrument,” she says. “It’s also given me a lot of freedom with my range and, for me, a kind of gender creativeness. I can sing really low and sing high and feel like two different people on a lot of the songs.”
The more meticulous she becomes in making the songs, the more she has had to accept imperfection in releasing them. “I don’t think I would ever have released music if I hadn’t come to the conclusion that it’s never going to feel done or perfect for me,” she says. “Music is about feeling. Being a good artist is about allowing yourself to be seen as imperfect too.”
