The verdict on Adele’s new album, 25
Adele
25
(XL Recordings)
★★★★☆
After nearly a five-year wait, here’s the thing that will save the music industry, herald the return of quality songwriting and maybe inspire world peace while it’s at it. To say a lot is riding on Adele’s new album is like saying Elton John likes Christmas. Her 2011 record 21 has sold 30 million copies, went to No 1 in 30 countries and was the last to sell in vast numbers before streaming took hold. Adele is the everywoman from West Norwood with whom the world fell in love. It is hoped that her long-awaited third album will reclaim the format as something worth holding on to. But is it any good?
There’s nothing on 25 to match Someone Like You. Adele was a relative unknown when she wrote that perfect evocation of heartbreak, featured on 21, and was expressing deep feelings after a break-up. Now she is a vastly successful, happily coupled-up mother of one who knows — as she explains to Graham Norton on tomorrow’s Adele at the BBC show — that 21 “got bigger than I was”. Yet 25 is an honest portrayal of her life as it is now — except she’s actually 27.
Adele’s thoughts on love, loneliness and the disconnection of fame are set against refined pop-rock, played out mostly on piano and guitar but with moments of major orchestration. Surgery on her vocal cords four years ago has given her voice a mature, weathered quality.
The artist she now resembles most is Barbra Streisand. Both are glamorous, working-class women who use a strong, unadorned voice to put their character into sophisticated songs with widespread resonance. With Streisand-like professionalism, Adele has released an album that offers few surprises — she was never going to take a detour into heavy metal — but plenty of big, emotional ballads. Here, 25 speaks to the heart in a universal fashion and puts British pop back at the heart of modern life where it belongs.
Hello
The lead single, at No 1 pretty much everywhere, is a message to an old lover but also one from the biggest singer in the world as she reconnects with her public. “Hello, it’s me/ I was wondering if after all these years you’d like to meet,” sings Adele in a song that offers everything fans could ask for: a sad piano opening, a feverish climax, orchestral swells to bring that Streisand comparison into focus and a general tone of accessible, Radio 2-friendly pop sophistication.
Send My Love (To Your New Lover)
This is the album’s jaunty moment, a pure pop tune not a million miles away from Taylor Swift’s recent hits and with a Swift-type message of kissing goodbye to an old lover. “Treat her better,” she requests, with a touch of cattiness, before telling her old beau that he couldn’t handle her “hot heat rising”. Swift favourite Max Martin co-wrote and produced the song.
I Miss You
Phil Collins was rumoured to be one of the album’s collaborators. That didn’t happen but his influence is felt on the In the Air Tonight-style drums of this R&B-tinged song that has a sexiness Adele has hitherto shied away from. “Treat me soft but touch me cruel,” she purrs, in a way that doesn’t sound entirely convincing.
When We Were Young
There’s a sense of loss to this ballad, written with the relatively unknown Canadian songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr and combining Sixties-tinged soul on simple piano and bass lines with words about the sadness of time passing. “I’ve been by myself all night long, hoping you’re someone I used to know,” sings Adele on 25’s most heartfelt and powerful track. Her delivery is intimate yet grand. The crack in her voice as she sings, “You look like a movie, you sound like a song,” is worth the price of the album alone.
Remedy
A classic piano ballad written with songwriter-to-the-stars Ryan Tedder, Remedy is, like much of 25, inspired by memories of more innocent times. “I remember all the things I thought I wanted to be,” sings Adele, before the song develops into a romantic promise of togetherness, ensuring it will soundtrack slow dances at wedding receptions for the foreseeable future.
Water Under the Bridge
The ghost of the old lover who inspired Someone Like You clings to 25 in a moment of Eighties-style pop-rock that would do Lionel Richie proud. “If you’re going to let me down, let me down gently,” sings Adele. Co-written with Greg Kurstin, who has had hits with Lily Allen, Sia and Lana Del Rey, this veers into cheese, rewakening uncomfortable memories of bubble perms, piano neckties and awkward fumbles at the school disco.
River Lea
Another highlight: a big-scale belter, opening with a church organ, on which Adele blames a waterway in east London for her emotional problems. “When I was a child I grew up by the River Lea/ There was something in the water and now that something’s in me,” she sings, explaining why she can’t connect with a lover. The River Lea can certainly be dangerous. In 2011 a mysterious predator, perhaps a pike or a crocodile, pulled down a canada goose. Still, it took Adele to infuse the river with the power to cause emotional constipation.
Love in the Dark
A classic ballad of abject misery set to the kind of orchestration and plaintive piano that made Adele’s Bond theme Skyfall such an epic. This tale of rejection, with Adele this time doing the dumping, will inspire wobbling chins and fluttering hand movements the world over. “Please don’t fall apart/ I can’t face your breaking heart,” she cries, before adding with devastating finality: “I can’t stay this time because I don’t love you any more.”
Million Years Age
A simple acoustic-guitar lament with a Gallic tint, this is about the existence Adele can never return to. “I feel my life is flashing by and all I can do is watch and cry,” she sings, inspired by a recent trip to Brockwell Park in southeast London, where she would hang out as a teenager. It’s hard to write about the challenges of fame without griping about first-world problems, but the loneliness of “when I walk around the streets where I grew up they can’t look me in the eye . . . it’s like they’re scared of me” hits home.
All I Ask
This recalls the whimsical, intimate soft-rock sound of Carly Simon and Carole King, or even the Carpenters. “This is my last night with you/ Hold me like I’m more than just a friend,” Adele sings over piano, rising up a key towards the end in an overwrought display of vocal grandstanding. And you think: oh dear. A lot of people are going to have affairs to this song.
Sweetest Devotion
Paul Epworth, the British producer who was so instrumental in turning 21 into such a monster hit, co-wrote this, the only rock song on 25. It begins with children’s voices, features an ominous drone and rises into a guitar epic complete with woo-hoos, a riff that could have come off a Rolling Stones classic and Adele singing “You’re my rock, you’re my darkness/ You’re the right kind of madness”. It’s a celebratory way to an end an album of great confidence, little arrogance and much charm.