Aja (/ˈeɪʒə/, pronounced "Asia") is the sixth studio album by the American rock band Steely Dan, released on September 23, 1977, by ABC Records.

For the album, band leaders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker pushed Steely Dan further into experimenting with different combinations of session players, enlisting the services of nearly 40 musicians, while pursuing longer, more sophisticated compositions and arrangements.

At the 20th Annual Grammy Awards, Aja won Best Engineered Recording – Non-Classical, and was nominated for Album of the Year and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.

[5] The album cover features a photograph by Hideki Fujii of Japanese model and actress Sayoko Yamaguchi,[6][7] and was designed by Patricia Mitsui and Geoff Westen.

[10] In anticipation of the release, Katz urged the relatively private Fagen and Becker to raise their public profile, and arranged a meeting with Irving Azoff to discuss employing him as their manager.

[9] According to Billboard, Aja was Steely Dan's biggest hit and was one of the first albums to be given the then-new Platinum certification by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for one million US sales.

[11] Attempts to make a surround-sound mix of the album for a release in the late 1990s were scrapped when it was discovered that the multitrack masters for both "Black Cow" and the title track were missing.

He added that the duo's "extreme intellectual self-consciousness", though it might be starting to show its limitations with this album, "may be precisely the quality that makes Walter Becker and Donald Fagen the perfect musical antiheroes for the Seventies.

"[23] Robert Christgau of The Village Voice wrote that he "hated this record for quite a while before I realized that, unlike The Royal Scam, it was stretching me some", and noted that he was "grateful to find Fagen and Becker's collegiate cynicism in decline", but worried that a preference for longer, more sophisticated songs "could turn into their fatal flaw".

[28][29][30] Walters noted in his review that "the album's surreal sonic perfection, its melodic and harmonic complexity - music so technically demanding its creators had to call in A-list session players to realize the sounds they heard in their heads but could not play, even on the instruments they had mastered.

[citation needed] In 2000, Aja was voted number 118 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's book All Time Top 1000 Albums, where the author noted its "brand of jazz-influenced white soul".

[39] Writing for uDiscoverMusic in 2019, Paul Sexton said that, with the album, Steely Dan "announced their ever-greater exploration of jazz influences", which would lead to "their yacht-rock masterpiece": 1980's Gaucho.

[40] Patrick Hosken of MTV News said that both Aja and Gaucho show how "great yacht rock is also more musically ambitious than it might seem, tying blue-eyed soul and jazz to funk and R&B".

wrote that "The song and performance that best exemplifies the half-time, funky, laid (way) back in the beat shuffle within the jazz-pop environment of the mid- to late- 70s can be found on 'Home at Last.'