Athens, Greece-based tellas new album Adagio is a psych-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.

Almost as soon as tella Chronopoulou began writingAdagio, her fifth album as tella, 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. tella 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 tella were letting go of long-unnecessary baggage. For a spell, she set the instrumental aside. She wasnt ready yet, or in a rush.

tella, 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 tella, now based in the heart of Athens. She has become one of modern Greeces most popular musical exports, with three sophisticated, playful pop albums rendered with international lan. After her Sub Pop debut, Up and Away, in 2022, she catapulted beyond three million monthly Spotify listeners. That success was a blessing, but tella sometimes found herself pining for the slower pace of her youth. That longing is the thread that loosely binds together her fifth album, the entrancingAdagio. Borrowing its name from the term for music thats meant to be played slowly,Adagiois 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 Gabriel Stebbing,Adagiois a 27-minute meditation on love and desire, rest and time. Though the bulk of it is sung in English, tella delivers her first two songs in Greek hereOmorfo Mou, the one that began on the boat, and a cover of a 1969 cult classic of the Greek New Wave, Litsa Sakelarious Ta Vimata. It is a sign of the self-assurance that radiates throughout these tender and smitten little tunes.Start to finish, tella sounds more at ease and comfortable than shes ever been onAdagio. These fetching songs will not slow her career or grant her that title tracks wish. But, for half an hour,Adagioadds a measure of warmth to the world, with time loosening its grip even if it doesnt slow down.