Adele is a vocal powerhouse with an out-of-time sensibility, and she takes long hiatuses between albums. It has been six years since her previous record, “25,” and much has changed in the world of popular music, whose pace Adele has long been proudly out of synch with.
One reductive description that has been used to characterize Adele’s music and her cultural imprint is that she is “for moms.” Since her career took off, in 2011, with her sophomore album, “21,” a potent breakup record that gradually became canon, Adele’s contemporary take on soul, blues, and gospel has been appreciated as a monument to tradition.
She makes music that everyone can feel good about, in particular the voters of the Recording Academy, who have given her fifteen Grammy Awards over the years, most of them in major categories.
Born Adele Adkins—although she is so deserving of a mononym that to see her surname in print is disconcerting—and raised mostly in North London, she studied at the same performing-arts academy that Amy Winehouse had dropped out of, several years before.
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’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 personal.
. 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.
“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 Heart Out.” The song is Motown-lite, made jauntier with the swing of reggae guitar and handclapping, and it points to a newfound stylistic elasticity.
One of Adele’s closest 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 Erroll Garner and transforms Adele into a coquettish lounge singer in the thrall of new love.
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