Review
Genre and Mood
Σtella’s Picking Words, credited here simply as Stella, opens her first album, which Discogs files under synth-pop, new wave and indie rock. It is a love song with a playful surface and a turn in it: romantic at the start, bittersweet by the end, in the way Europavox describes her songs, lush pop anchored by a touch of melancholy.
Song Summary
The lyric follows a narrator choosing her words carefully as a relationship begins, then deciding, when the other person only knows how to take, that she is starting to love them less, with not an ounce of regret. Σtella wrote the music and the words, arranged the song and produced it with NTEIBINT, who also mixed it; King Elephant engineered it, recorded in King Elephant’s basement, and Yannis Christodoulatos mastered it.
Musical Breakdown
No published review takes Picking Words apart section by section, so this review stays with what its credits and lyric show. Σtella sings and plays electric guitar, bass, synth bass and synthesizers and programs the drums; Velissarios Prassas arranged the bass part and plays bass, Theod Kopoul plays drums and Danae Eco adds synthesizers. The title line returns as a refrain, and the song closes on its opening verse.
Concepts in Focus
The synthesizer is central to the record: two players are credited with synthesizers, Σtella and Danae Eco, and Σtella plays synth bass as well. Europavox describes her first two albums as built around 80s synth-pop sounds, which is the tradition Discogs’s new wave and synth-pop labels point to.
The same description begins with the bassline, shimmering 70s disco basslines. On Picking Words the bass part has its own arranger, Prassas, and is played both on a bass guitar and on a synthesizer, so it is worth following on its own from start to finish.
Inner Ear put the song on YouTube as audio in December 2014 and as a music video in June 2015, directed by Christos Massalas, starring Σtella and Effi Rabsilber and filmed at Studio Mabrida in Athens. Compare NTEIBINT, Σtella – The Owner, her single with NTEIBINT from the same year.
Artistic Context
Σtella, also known as Stella with a sigma, is Stella Chronopoulou, a pop singer-songwriter, painter and multi-instrumentalist from Athens. Her self-titled debut came out on the Greek label Inner Ear in February 2015, the vinyl edition limited to 300 copies. Sub Pop, which released her album Up and Away in 2022, describes her albums as sophisticated and playful pop.
Impact and Reception
Picking Words stayed with her on stage: she played it in a session for the radio station En Lefko 87.7 and at the Schoolwave festival in 2017, and it represented her on a compilation of SXSW 2017 showcase artists. Start here, then follow her to Sub Pop.
