Early in the press cycle for her fourth LP, Adele referred to 30 as her most personal album yet—a high bar for someone whose wrenching second album taught the entire world how to cry and compelled Julia Roberts to publicly threaten Adele’s next boyfriend. You could say Big Feelings, backed up with the full weight of her expressive mezzo-soprano, made the London-born singer-songwriter one of the most universally admired pop stars on the planet. These include (but are not limited to): giving your heart away and having it played to the beat, resigning yourself to someone who reminds you of an ex, fearing that love will elude you forever or that it’s somehow trapped in the past, crystallized in amber. It’s hard to imagine something more personal than the empathy bombs that Adele typically drops, but she did not lie about 30.
Here, she’s telling a more unexpected story about love: What it means to inflict that pain on your family, to rebuild yourself from scratch, and—big exhale—to try to love again. The task necessitated a more nuanced writing style and looser structures to some of the songs, resulting in Adele’s most ambitious album to date. The way the 33-year-old interacts with storied traditions feels more in sync with contemporary pop, R&B, and hip-hop, as though she’s taking cues from newer visionaries like Jazmine Sullivan and Frank Ocean as much as her diva elders. She worked with producer Inflo, of London collective SAULT and Little Simz acclaim, on three songs that bring a real warmth and soulfulness to the record’s final third. And her vocals are more playful: Motown-style background vox are modulated to a chirp on “Cry Your Heart Out” and “Love Is a Game,” in a kind of remix of her usual retro homage.
Adele, like other hermetic superstars, dislikes celebrity but makes no effort to conceal the fact that her life inspired her art. Without much context or arc, the polished songs on 2015’s 25 didn’t land in quite the same way as the overwhelming hits of 21. (Though Adele, like Jennifer Coolidge, did wonderful things to redefine greetings.) On 30, Adele makes her story legible—it’s about “divorce, babe, divorce,” going through your Saturn Return, all the things of Nancy Meyers movies but happening 20 years earlier—and shows that it’s complicated and undeniably her own.
The stage is set by the twinkling Fender Rhodes chords that open “Strangers by Nature,” a collaboration with film composer and producer Ludwig Göransson. Inspired by the songs of Judy Garland and the 1992 Meryl Streep/Goldie Hawn dark comedy Death Becomes Her, Adele mourns her past relationships in a manner so dramatic and forlorn, it’s practically camp—complete with Disney strings and an opening line worthy of a Smiths song (“I’ll be taking flowers to the cemetery of my heart”). Then comes “Easy on Me,” the grounding piano ballad whose swooping eee’s underscore once again that our most expressive singers can make magic from a single syllable. The song represents the first of many times on 30 that Adele will ask for grace—from herself, the lord, and her young son Angelo.