More about: Adele

“I’ll be taking flowers to the cemetery of my heart”. So begins Adele’s fourth studio album 30, a continuum of the singer’s tradition in naming albums after the age she was when she began recording them. Now 33, the album emerges from a time when the multi-multi-million record-selling artist was going through a separation—and eventual divorce—from her partner and the father of her child.

Now on the other side of the hurtful press, the intermittent depression and the need to reply to her continuously-questioning young son (“why?” We hear him say in a sample on ‘My Little Love’, presumably a question he asked many a time over the course of the divorce), Adele is relaunching into the public eye. If the Oprah interview, the double Vogue cover or that Instagram Live weren’t enough to reacquaint yourself with the Tottenham native, then this album will be. With 30, Adele is at her most open and her most inventive, but not always her best.

On the confessional side of things, rarely have we been let so deeply into the world of Adele. Though famous for her candidness and her wicked laugh, the direct raw-heartedness exhibited here reaches new levels. "No one knows what it's like to be us," she sings on opener 'Strangers By Nature'. On ‘My Little Love’, we get a full run-through, a voicenote rolling as Adele cries and talks through a difficult day ("I feel like today is the first day since I left him that I feel lonely"). 

She resurrects the voicemail trope at the end of ‘I Drink Wine’, where it interrupts an otherwise smooth-as-silk track. To some extent, the confessional additions feel unnecessary everywhere. In the seven-minute ‘To Be Loved’, Adele says all she needs to say in a genuinely moving belter and album highlight that sounds as if it was recorded during a particularly painful day. “Let it be known that I tried,” she sings in the most powerful register we’ve perhaps ever heard from her. Even on those songs that contain both singing and voicenotes—such as 'My Little Love'—the additions also seem unnecessary, though the clips of Adele's own son do bring us closer to the effects of this divorce, and divorce in general.

There is plenty of what we might call Classic Adele here, including on the massive, and growingly essential ‘Easy On Me’ as well as on the Gospel-tinged ‘I Drink Wine’ and ‘Hold On’, both songs that she chose to perform during her One Night Only performance. ‘All Night Parking’ would have been a good option to bring out at the event, as it shares many tropes of Adele-ism—vintage glamour, longing lyrics—while also moving things along into a more fiery realm in which sadness and growing confidence co-exist alongside shuddering quicktime percussion and slinky keys.

30 is at its best when it straddles this recognisable Adele-ness with the smoky jazz of an Amy Winehouse bent. On ‘Cry Your Heart Out’, ‘All Night Parking’, ‘Love Is A Game’ and the vaguely bossa nova ‘Woman Like Me’, Adele seems to evoke the late fellow North Londoner, and though on the latter the experiment falls short, the former three are triumphs in reinvention. If 30 had followed this lead it might have proved better as a listen-through. Instead we’re tripped by a couple of strange additions.

’Can I Get It’ could well have been written by Ed Sheeran with its saccharine acoustic guitar staccato. It’s a good pop song, but it doesn’t seem to fit into the mould of 30. Nor does 'Oh My God', which further trips the silky journey of the album with its hyper-produced backing vocal riffs and computer-generated claps reminiscent of a Jungle record.

If one thing is consistent on 30, it is the clarity and beauty of its production. Whether visiting old tropes, trying new ones or combining the two, the sound of 30 is perhaps the best we have heard from Adele yet. And of course, through it all, we have that voice. As strong as it's ever been—more so, even, for the pain its owner has experienced—Adele is still the Adele you missed so much and the one you were hoping to return. The album, and a handful of songs from it, will doubtless dominate the Christmas charts and the sales of its vinyl issue will delay smaller artists' prints by months (an issue for another article). Though it doesn't move firmly into a new area of reinvention, 30 does begin a journey towards one, and in the end, it delivers in its simple promise of being a big, belting Adele Album.

30 arrives 19 November via Sony.

More about: Adele