Last year, Stel scored a TikTok hit off her first EP, Object Permanence, with “I’ll Take It,” trying on her best Ella Yelich-O’Connor atop some Boy Harsher rave stabs. On the greatest album of all time, her voice is less affected yet further out of reach, persistently clouded by AutoTune and sometimes submerged under the beats, so only her sibilants break the surface. It’s like hearing her through an exceptional high, and the way Stel plays with scale and setting will feel familiar to anyone who’s ever K-holed or greened out: You’ll blink and find you’ve changed locations without consciously moving a muscle. The syrupy “Wedding Song” sends a piano line sauntering down the aisle, then Stel dips into a slurred, singsongy cadence, there’s a trap drop, and it’s like riding shotgun while she raps along to Barter 6 and takes hits off her vape. A puff of smoke drifts over to the following track and becomes the plume of a fog machine as “Now I’ve Got a Lot You Know” warps into a post-hyperpop jock jam.
the greatest album of all time operates on an expansive, unstratified taste profile, one in which Carrie & Lowell and 2 SLIZZY 2 SEXY hold equal clout. That could be a product of Stel’s peculiar childhood—a deeply religious upbringing (she has used the word “indoctrinated”) on the island peninsula of Victoria—but it’s also just what it means to be Gen Z. From one angle, “Molly in the Club” is a continuation of Stel’s 2025 EP, How to Win at Solitaire, where she bitcrushed trip-hop and shoegaze through the narrow channels of her wired earbuds. From another, it sounds like “Kind & Generous” by Natalie Merchant. Stel is hardly alone in her affinity for radio trash—see underscores’ U; Malibu’s “United in Flames” NTS show; Kelly Moran’s ambient Tate McRae remixes—but to my knowledge no one else has shouted out LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” twice on the same LP. Stel’s choice of reference points never seems like posturing, though, and she’s learning how to stitch them together while leaving behind the puckered seams that trace her path through the algorithm.
This is vibe music and that’s part of the appeal. What elevates the greatest album of all time above more standard fodder for pregames and parking-lot smoke seshes is the neon current of romance running beneath its songs. Stel made almost the whole record by herself, in hotel rooms and Airbnbs while on tour, and her littlest production details exude so much feeling it’s like they’re radioactive. A bell tolls at the beginning of “I’ll Walk”; is Bladee about to drop in? Is this Stel’s nuptials or her funeral? Turns out it’s both—the death of a bachelor and an engagement party. Stel even brings out the string quartet. The two great love affairs of her young life—her partner and the radio—comingle on “Better Believe It,” a song that could’ve only been made by someone with room in their heart for snap rap and Katy Perry’s “Hummingbird Heartbeat.” “My gasoline yeah, the reason I move,” Stel murmurs, caught in the thrall of her own bleary-eyed ballad. Sincerity looks good on her.