Back in the teletype days “-30-”The mark journalists used to signify the end of a report was called “The End of the Story”. Adele has given her fourth album a name. “30”It’s not a coincidence that she gets her LP titles from her years when most of the songs were composed. Still, the antiquated coinage is sort of fitting anyway for an album that’s like a long exhalation that’s saying IT … IS … FINISHED, to borrow a favorite phrase of writers, messiahs and divorcees everywhere.
What’s very much done on “30” (which comes out Friday) is Adele’s marriage, as almost anyone sentient knows from the abundance of walk-up media, from twin global Vogue covers to an Oprah sit-down viewed in the U.S this week by nearly 10 million. All of these appearances have her talking about the fact that she initiated the split, as casually as she would if she were talking about giving up aspartame in favor of green tea. Rest assured, though, that there’s nothing casual about the way she treats the dissolution on “30,”A album that is filled with enough heartbreaking, life-and death drama to leave you exhausted and ready to reinvest. Because, besides being that exhausting, it’s also that good.
Some lighter songs, about moving forward, are a hint at what Adele-on the-rebound might sound like. But the real rebound, for now, is in Adele as an artist, and that has a lot to do with how ridiculously candid she’s getting, again, along with the increased quotient of musical chances she’s taking. Her previous album, 2015’s “25,” took on the appearance of being that confessional, but she admitted in interviews that it didn’t really represent her then-reasonably-contented headspace … that she was relying on old heartaches for new material, so that the record kind of ended up being a “21 II.” With that water-treading sequel, she’d zigged to making the weakest of her four albums. With “30,” she’s zagged to a richer, more compelling collection that feels like her best.
That’s not to say “30” will be nearly the biggest seller of them all (it won’t) or that it has a string of obvious world-conquering singles embedded within it (although it has a good enough handful of un-obvious ones). But there’s a bracing maturity in these 12 tracks that’s more emotionally complex and intriguing than the rather more easy-to-follow woe of the preceding three collections. And even though “30” is at times the rawest and most sobering of the records she’s made to date, it also manages conversely to be the most fun, in its emotionally rattling fashion, as Adele mixes it up with an array of producers and stylistic pastiches to arrive at something that has a sense of play to go with all the sadness and self-laceration. It’s a kick in the pants as well as a solid cry. The fact that it is a little more chaotic than her other albums makes it perfect for a trip through a divorce court.
The first track. “Strangers by Nature,”This is a hint that there will be other things in this collection. It’s the only number co-produced by Oscar-winning film composer Ludwig Göransson, albeit one of five with an orchestra conducted and/or arranged by MVP David Campbell (yes, that’s Beck’s symphonically inclined dad). All those strings come to sound so ’50s-lush, like something out of a Douglas Sirk movie, it’s hard to tell whether they’re there to heighten the melodrama or add a wink. If it’s not 100% clear on this opener whether the mood is supposed to be dead-serious or she and her collaborators are meaning to imbue things with a wee bit of delicious musical irony, that’s not the last time on the album those contrasts come into play. Some points she sounds almost like Amy Winehouse’s former rival Amy Winehouse. She is clearly capable of subduing her full-bathos divaness to embrace jazz-style music more.
The Greg Kurstin produced second track brings the Adele you thought to be familiar back into sharp focus “Easy on Me,” which was picked as the first single for a reason: Musically, at least, it’s the one where she’s most saying “Hello,” again, and it makes a good segue into some of the album’s riskier deviations from form. Even here, though, she’s not the Adele of past records, once you get into content. She’s grappling with being the possible offendee, not the offended, as she asks an ex for something that feels like forgiveness for leaving — even if there’s more chutzpah than contrition in her tone. In “30,” leaving means never having to say you’re sorry, but it does involve constantly acknowledging the costs of moving on. After having spent all these years identifying with Adele as the scorned party, is the world ready to embrace her exploring how she’s caused other people pain by going indie, maritally speaking? (Based on the initial responses to “Easy on Me,”The answer is likely to be a simple yes. “yes.”)
Track No. 3 is where Adele’s audience will collectively push its earbuds in further to hear more clearly, not to explore the sonics but because the track has snippets of having some extraordinarily emotional conversations with her son, presumably captured on a smartphone in the midst of some especially fraught moments. “Mommy’s been having a lot of big feelings lately,”She said, “What counts as understatement?” “I feel like I don’t really know what I’m doing, at all…” Some of the comments may come off as TMI for a child, though it’s not clear if they’re all mother/son chats or some might be memos-to-self. “I’m having a bad day… I feel very stressed… I have a hangover.”She said “today is the first day since I left him,” that she is dealing head-on with the loneliness she’s been avoiding. She has been overcompensating with too many outings, and now she wants to be alone. “watch TV and have a bit of a bawl and be in my sweats.”(Here and the world, both. If you’re wondering what kind of a bed these spoken thoughts are dropped into: It’s a nominally feel-good, almost seductive groove that starts out with a low-key electric piano and ends in one of those swirls of orchestration that return throughout the record. Basically, it’s kind of a chilled-out Sade track about being a torn-up single mom.
You have been reduced to a somewhat weirded-out puddle. “30”It then makes a three song detour to a trio its most commercial songs. “Cry Your Heart Out,”Despite its title, the song is smooth on another good, Kurstin-provided groove that flirts with reggae. “I can’t get no relief, I’m so tired of myself / I swear I’m dead in the eyes / I have nothing to feel no more / I can’t even cry,”She protests. “I’ve never been more scared.”This is one of the possible singles. That’s because it doesn’t feel nearly as grim on record as it reads on paper. There’s a bit of levity in Adele’s self-overdubbed background vocals, which feel like the Andrews Sisters meeting Gwen Stefani meeting vintage soul to come in and give her a lift. And for those harrowing verses, there’s some affirmation in the chorus: “Cry your heart out / It’ll clean your face… / All love is devout / No feeling is a waste,”As she sings, a Hammond Organ adds some warmth. You can picture Oprah admiring the song and perhaps lighting up a smoke.
The next step is “Oh My God,” a song that, from just its title, sounds like it might be one of the album’s harrowing-AF entries. Wrong guess, there: It’s the record’s sexy-AF breakout. “Oh My God”Kurstin’s closest attempt to bring the music and the sounds of 2021 together is this song, which she does best with a four-on the-floor beat and some electrosquiggles. It doesn’t sound too far-fetched. Although she’s “still spinning out of control from the fall”There is no divorce settlement. “boy”Who “give(s) good love, I won’t lie / It what keeps me coming back even though I’m terrified… / I know it’s wrong, but I want to have fun.”
There’s one more where that light banger came from. Max Martin and Shellback appear together once-in-a-lifetime as co-producing/writing. “Can I Get It,” which represents the record’s most obvious booster-shot-bop. It’s a track made up of so many disparate parts, figuring out whether or not they organically connect isn’t easy even on a third or fourth listen. But they’re some delectable parts, as Martin & Shellback’s Frankenstein-ian pop confection moves from solo acoustic guitar to brash electronic beat and back again. By the way, we won’t be the last to mention that those guitar strums on the chorus sound so blatantly “Faith”-ful, it’s like they’re daring you not to bring up George Michael.
“I Drink Wine” is the track that Adele-aholics have already decided is their favorite; they don’t even need to hear it, with that title. It won’t be a letdown, even though it’s all about letdowns. “How come we’ve both become a version of a person we don’t like?” she sings, over a solo piano bed that isn’t mournful, like the one in “Easy on Me,”But it’s sweet and gospelly. Hammond and background vocals will also make a return to the song, helping it reach the church or the church of the poisoned brain. “Listen, I know how low I can go / I give as good as I get / You get the brunt of it all ‘cause you’re all I’ve got left,”She sings in a doozy marital postgame recap.
Tossing the pendulum in the direction of fun, the song with a most awkward title. “All Night Parking (With Erroll Gardner) Interlude,” has Adele as a romantic chantoosie, singing fresh lyrics over a vintage Gardner jazz piano instrumental that’s embellished a bit with newly recorded trumpet and violin. She’s not drinking wine here so much as drinking Winehouse, or at least coming off as a friskier Norah Jones. This utterly charming lark will be the last time on the album she’s enjoying a night out as a newly single woman. Refasten your seatbelts; it’s still going to be a bumpy dark night of the soul.
She’s still sounding jazzy, but in a darker, chiding mode, on “Woman Like Me,”The one song that will change your life “30” where she’s really lashing out at an ex, or a soon-to-be ex. “Complacency is the worst trait to have — are you crazy?”She asks. “It is so sad a man like you could be so lazy.”She presents a scenario in the which a man retreats to his old circle, rather than rising up to the occasion or embracing her boss-hood. There’s a small world of romantic and class power dynamics to unpack as she lays out her case: “We come from the same place but you will never give it up / It’s where they make you feel powerful / That’s why you think I make you feel small / But that’s your projection, not my rejection.” The richness of the song comes in how she’s able to assert her power but also lick her wounds, as Adele insists she dared to really love for the first time and lost, not to another lover but maybe the most depressing rival of all — ennui. “I saw what my heart can really do / Now some other man will get the love I have for you / ‘Cause you don’t care.” Assuming this is autobiographical, it’s worth considering that the other party might have a good defense we won’t likely hear, but it’s sure bracing to hear Adele’s prosecution. It seemed that there may still be a mystery as to why Adele left the marriage, judging by the Oprah interview. This song reveals a lot of the story. She goes to a pretty dark place, and she’s not leaving us in the dark about it.
And we’re not to the two tracks that most listeners are likely to consider the album’s biggest twin stunners. Next is the Oprah-certified “Hold On,” in which all the self-possessed spit and vinegar of Adele’s preceding tirade disappears as she trains that same attention on herself. “I swear to God I am such a mess / The harder that I try, I regress / I am my own worst enemy / Right now I truly hate being me,”She sings, reassuring her audience that she isn’t as charming as she appears. If she is not altogether successful in that, it’s still an unnerving amount of self-shade she’s throwing here. This one feels churchy, too, but in a splayed-across-an-empty-pew kind of way, with a more hopeful vocal refrain so faint it seems to be coming from the back of the cathedral: “Let time be patient / Let pain be gracious.” As with the preceding track, Inflo (the critically beloved mastermind behind Sault), takes over the co-producer/writer chair on this one, and clearly got her to take an elevator down a level or two beneath the ones she’s accessed before.
The MostBravura vocals on an album that contains a surplus of them come with the penultimate tune. “To Be Loved” — seven minutes of nothing but Adele and co-writer-producer Tobias Jesso Jr.’s piano. It’s not just the best singing Adele has ever delivered; you might leave it thinking it’s one of the best vocals anyone has ever recorded. (That may just be the emotional Stockholm syndrome talking, this far into the track list, but you’ll see what we mean when you get there.) You and your marriage may feel dead while she delivers this operatic soliloquy. She argues for the necessity to give up the safety and security that makes it barely functional in order to believe that greater love is possible.
Then there’s the best part: “30” finds its actual climax where it probably should — in a fun, cynical romp of a finale, one that takes just a little of the piss out of the sobriety of the last few songs. You can watch the entire thing on Youtube. “Love Is a Game” (no relation to Winehouse’s “Love Is a Losing Game”… well, maybe a little), the strings kick back in and swell to their grandest, and Adele does an almost girl-group call-and-response with herself while overtly invoking the pop-soul records of the ’60s and early ’70s. At that concluding point, Adele makes it clear that she doesn’t need her ex, but doesn’t need any new lusts in her life either, because love sucks. It’s hard to argue with the fact that you are singing along and creating your own Shirelles and Pips gestures.
“30” is obviously a major entry in pop’s long divorce-album canon. Along with Kacey Musgraves’ recent “Star Crossed,” it falls into that tricky realm where no infidelity is being alleged as a source of rage, but inertia and carelessness are being asserted as irreconcilable differences just as assiduously as if there’d been cheating. The feelings of guilt or pride that come with splitting under those circumstances aren’t always as easy to put in a four-minute song … which may explain why some of them on “30”Are six to seven minutes. But you don’t have to render a judgment on her IRL situation to know she’s made the argument for going solo about as adroitly as anyone in her musical position has.
But if you’re shedding tears, maybe shed one more for the nation’s marriage counselors. Adele celebrates her own conscious uncoupling with enough visceral triumph that, come next week, it wouldn’t be a surprise if some family therapists could start getting voicemail messages that their services are no longer required. If “30”if the paperwork is already at the courthouse, it could be on the AirPods.
“30”
Adele
Columbia Records
CREDITS: Producers: Greg Kurstin, Inflo, Max Martin & Shellback, Tobias Jesso Jr., Shawn Everett, Ludwig Göransson, Joey Pecoraro. David Campbell, string arranger and conductor.