Adele’s return: Big feelings, fully mastered
Adele
30 ★★★★
“Adele has never sounded more ferocious,” said Rob Sheffield in Rolling Stone. The British belter has been singing about big feelings since she debuted in 2008. But in the six years since she released 25, the world’s best-selling album in that time, Adele entered her 30s and split with her husband.The queen of heartbreak has now returned with her “most powerful record yet.” Somehow, “her vocals have gotten even more expressive,” exhibiting greater suppleness “without sacrificing any of the primal firepower that made her famous in the first place.” And though 30 is fueled by turbulent emotions, it isn’t an angry album. “It’s the sound of a woman who suffered through a horrific crisis without losing her soul, her passion, or her sense of humor.”
Adele isn’t resentful—she’s remorseful, said Jon Pareles in The New York Times.
Her lyrics show “a new, grown-up skepticism and ambivalence about love itself.” At times, she can become too candid, as she does on “My Little Love,” which replays voice memos she recorded for her 9-year-old son after the split, some that catch her sobbing. More often, Adele’s writing “presents her as her own unfinished self-improvement project” while she croons in the secular-gospel mode in which she’s most at home. Though the piano ballad and lead single “Easy on Me” will sound familiar to longtime fans, the rest of 30 “has a sense of play to go with all the sadness and self-laceration,” said Chris Willman in Variety. “Cry Your Heart Out” flirts with reggae. Later, Adele recalls “a friskier Norah Jones” on “All Night Parking,” an “utterly charming” track on which she sings over a vintage Erroll Garner jazz piano sample that’s been set to a trap beat.Though 30 is at times the “most sobering” of the records Adele has made, “it also manages to be the most fun, in its emotionally rattling fashion.”