Stella is the fourth studio album by the Swiss electronic band Yello, first released in Germany, Switzerland and Austria on 29 January 1985, and in the UK and US in March 1985.

[1] It was the first album made by the band without founder member Carlos Perón, and with his departure the remaining duo of Boris Blank and Dieter Meier began to move away from experimental electronic sounds towards a more commercial synthpop and cinematic soundtrack style.

Blank had purchased two new synthesizers in 1983, a Yamaha DX7 and a Roland JX-3P, but the album was mostly written and created using the equipment he already owned, a Fairlight CMI Series II sampler along with an ARP Odyssey synthesizer, the Linn LM-1 and Oberheim DMX drum machines, a Roland VP-330 Vocoder Plus, a Lexicon Hall reverb unit and a Framus guitar.

Meier explained that the duo felt that the songs were losing their soul, saying, "Getting technically more experienced was leading us onto a slick perfectionist track.

Featured during a scene involving a Ferrari 250 GT, and again over the closing credits sequence, interest in the track caused "Oh Yeah" to be released in the US in July 1986.

[7] Some of the songs and themes of Stella had begun as part of an operatic stage show titled Snowball that Meier had started developing in 1983.

He told the US magazine Trouser Press that the outline of the show was "Boris Blank plays a medieval magician/musician whose songs have an almost Rasputin-like influence over his listeners.

"[8] In the end Blank felt he was not a good enough actor to play the lead role, and Meier abandoned plans to put on Snowball as a stage show due to costs.

"[11] In a 2020 interview with Great Big Story, Meier claimed that Blank asked him to imagine himself as the king of Tonga relaxing on a beach, and that his vocals were derived from how he thought such a figure would act in this situation.

[12] The song "Blue Nabou" started life as a piece of advertising music commissioned for the soft drink Orangina in France in 1984.

In Record Mirror Betty Page enthused, "This picks up where [You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess] left off, taking its themes and mashing them up, pointing them in new, exciting directions... An album of moods and atmospheres, it must be listened to at maximum volume in a very dark room.

"[17] Kevin Murphy of Sounds declared that "Yello's wry, pulsating melodramas lavish themselves on Stella in a sensuous escapade, leaving no room for faint hearts or lovers.

"[18] Martin Aston of Melody Maker was less impressed, saying, "Their slick marriage... no, make it a steamy affair, between accessible splicing montage methods and sophisticated disco has the necessary balance of artifice and sweet melody, crisp danceateria [sic] moves and conceptual laziness (posing as artful dodging) that could conceivably pull the wool over people's eyes... Post-Fairlight, Yello are clever, sometimes too clever-clever, occasionally jarring as the montaging lays code upon codas.

[20] Reviewing all six reissued Yello albums in 2005, Ian Harrison of Mojo stated that Stella "saw further refinements in sound [to You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess] and a more pronounced Euro-pop agenda, but however slick tracks like 'Oh Yeah' or 'Vicious Games' might be, it's never entirely comfortable listening".

[16] AllMusic's John Bush believed that Stella was Yello's "best single LP, an excellent production throughout by Boris Blank, from the theatric instrumentals 'Stalakdrama' and 'Ciel Ouvert' to the frenetic pitched percussion on 'Let Me Cry'.