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Adele’s sense of scorn. “She is half your
age, but I’m guessing that’s the reason
that you strayed,” she spewed on “Ru-
mour Has It.”
Adele eventually married an entre-
preneur named Simon Konecki, and
in 2012 they had a son named Angelo.
On “25,” she cleared the bitterness that
lingered in the air after “21,” and reck-
oned with the passage of time. It was
her most musically conservative album,
polished and hearty but painted with
broad strokes and performed in a style
that sometimes teetered on the brink
of schlock. It was a blockbuster none-
theless. Around this time, Adele con-
sidered leaving music altogether. Maybe
quotidian sentimentality and nostalgia
didn’t make for the most inspired art.
But, in 2019, Adele divorced Konecki,
and found a new muse in her post-
breakup loneliness and confusion.
T
here is perhaps no artistic feat
better suited to Adele than a di-
vorce album, but “30” takes some un-
expected turns. Rather than focus on
conjugal despair and dissolution, Adele
allows herself to linger in the discom-
fiting yet exhilarating aftermath of her
split. (If you want a pop record that
faces divorce more squarely, seek out
Kacey Musgraves’s “Star-Crossed,”
from this year.) On “30,” Adele takes
a hard look in the mirror. “It’s about
time that I face myself,” she announces
on “To Be Loved,” an almost seven-
minute ballad that builds up the same
epic potential energy that Whitney
Houston did on “I Will Always Love
You.” Adele has removed the distance
between her music and her inner life,
and “30” is diaristic and intensely per-
sonal. It makes her first three albums
sound a bit clinical.
We’re used to hearing Adele belt,
but on this album she prefers to chat,
whisper, coo, crow, or grunt and groan.
On one track, “My Little Love”—an
exchange with her son that serves as
the album’s emotional centerpiece—
she uses samples of voice notes she re-
corded in the period after leaving
Konecki. “Mummy’s been having a lot
of big feelings lately,” she tells her son.
“Like how?” he asks. It’s a moment
that could seem treacly if it did not
sound so candid, and so uncomfort-
able. Later in the song, Adele breaks
into tears during a spoken-word con-
fession: “I just feel very lonely.... I
feel frightened that I might feel like
this at all.” This album does something
vanishingly rare in the attention-
deficient streaming era by stringing
together a tracklist that charts an
emotional trajectory. It begins with
rumination and despair, discovers li-
bidinal release (“Can I Get It”), and
then graduates to resolution, self-
knowledge, and catharsis. Each of its
final three tracks stretches past six min-
utes, including “To Be Loved,” a bal-
lad in which she extends her voice to
its breaking point and then keeps push-
ing. “Let it be known that I... trieeeeed,”
she gasps, hoarse, as if attempting to
insure that she’s exhausted her emo-
tional reserves.
When she is not addressing her
young son on “30,” Adele is often ad-
dressing herself, giving a pep talk or a
reproach. “Cry your heart out, it’ll clean
your face/When you’re in doubt, go
at your own pace,” she advises on a
playful song called “Cry Your HeartOut.” The song is Motown-lite, made
jauntier with the swing of reggae gui-
tar and handclapping, and it points to
a newfound stylistic elasticity. An ear-
lier version of Adele might have dis-
tilled all the emotional vagaries of di-
vorce into something reassuring in its
grandeur, but “30” is uneven in the
most gratifying way, which is to say
that it is an authentic chronicle of per-
sonal turbulence.
Adele has never concerned herself
with the trends of contemporary music,
and that is a huge part of her appeal.
“30” is no different, and she reaches
even farther into the past for musical
inspiration. She opens the record with
“Strangers by Nature,” an ornate song
inspired by Judy Garland’s vaudevil-
lian performances. One of Adele’s clos-
est collaborators is the record producer
and jazz pianist Greg Kurstin, and the
jazz influence infiltrates the album as
well—one song, “All Night Parking,”
samples the jazz-piano balladeer Er-
roll Garner and transforms Adele into
a coquettish lounge singer in the thrall
of new love. The last part of the album
has a strong gospel influence. And yet
“30” is Adele’s most modern-sounding
record yet, perhaps because of how flu-
idly and casually she slips between these
modes, and because of how unafraid
she is to let the seams show—to let
her voice crack while hitting a high
note. So many young artists aspire,
above all, to this kind of ease and ver-
satility. “I hope I learn to get over my-
self, and stop trying to be somebody
else,” Adele pledges on a song called
“I Drink Wine.” It’s a jarring state-
ment from somebody who sounds so
much like herself.