Deutsche Welle (English edition)
Adele's 'Easy on Me' has more than 33 million views on YouTube
The British singer's latest single comes after she announced she would be releasing her fourth album — dubbed the 'divorce album' — in November.
No stranger to singing about breakups and regrets, 15-time Grammy Award winner Adele released "Easy on Me" on all streaming platforms at midnight Friday UK time, with fans worldwide staying up to catch its premiere.
Two hundred and ninety-nine thousand people watched the video debut live on YouTube; the total number of views had topped 33 million late Friday night.
It is the first single from Adele's highly anticipated fourth studio album, scheduled to be released on November 19.
Adele had already teased fans with a 20-second snippet of "Easy on Me" during a recent Instagram Live session. When asked about the subject matter of her forthcoming album, she had simply responded: "Divorce babe, divorce."
The 'divorce album'
Keeping to her tradition of naming her albums after milestone birthdays — her previous record-breaking albums were titled 19, 21 and 25 — the 33year-old told the UK and US editions of Vogue that she had written 30 to explain her divorce from Simon Konecki to her young son, Angelo.
There had always been speculation about when exactly the pair had tied the knot. In her Vogue interview, Adele said, "The timeline the press have of my relationship, my marriage, is actually completely wrong. We got married when I was 30… and then I left." She however declined to elaborate how long the marriage had lasted. "Easy on Me” was apparently the first track written for this album.
On Wednesday, Adele told fans she was "finally" ready to release 30, which she described as her "ride or die throughout the most turbulent period of my life."
"I was certainly nowhere near where I'd hoped to be when I first started it nearly 3 years ago," she said in a statement posted on Twitter.
"I've learned a lot of blistering home truths about myself along the way. I've shed many layers but also wrapped myself in new ones," she tweeted.
The accompanying music video, which some might find reminiscent of her previous hit ballad "Hello,"– is first shot in black and white and shows her speaking on the phone while leaving a house with "For Sale" and "Sold" signs on it. She sings while driving off, the scenes interspersed with memories and music sheets blowing in the wind, after which the video changes into color.
A numbers game in November
Known for hits such as "Someone Like You" and "Hello," Adele is one of the most successful singer-songwriters of all time, having stormed charts worldwide, amassing on the way a clutch of Grammys and an Oscar for the James Bond theme song, "Skyfall."
Her last album, 25, went platinum in its first 24 hours, and some music industry watchers are expecting her to take top spot in a November that will see such big names as Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, Abba and Coldplay all releasing new material.