In interviews, Adele has mentioned astrological reasons for this imagery — the tumultuous Saturn return that occurs at the cusp of turning 30 — but it says something about her status in the pop world, too.
It’s a shift that’s sometimes subtle, evident in lyrics that make more room for both self-criticism and a sense of perspective, and in the way she responds to the rhythms and background voices within each song instead of merely powering forward.
Adele’s stance throughout 30 is one of engagement — with her own inner struggles, with the new world that opens up as she leaves a marriage, and with the musical milieu that’s emerged since 25 came out in 2016.
“Mama’s got a lot to learn,” she murmurs in the chorus of “My Little Love,” a hip-hop pastiche and the most experimental track on 30, which incorporates phone voice notes of conversations about loss and safety between the newly single mom and son Angelo.
30, on the other hand, engages with the world — through lyrics that trade adolescent romanticism for genuine self-examination, arrangements that reflect the present moment, and a vocal presence as warm and multifaceted as Adele is in interviews and her onstage patter, where she’s a pal who tells long stories and makes jokes, not a gravitational force.
That gift hasn’t faded; she can still animate a strictly emblematic chorus like, “Hold on, you are still strong, love will still come,” with the lifeblood of spontaneity.
Those collaborators take up the challenge Adele posed for herself by writing songs that dwell on complicated and sometimes even ugly feelings — the guilt she feels at breaking up her family and her distress at trying to explain divorce to her son, the alternating excitement and fear as she finds herself unpartnered for the first time in her adult life — and don’t automatically reach for the catharsis of big notes that won her international devotion.
Though the publicity campaign has presented the album as a reflection of pain and anxiety after Adele’s split from her partner of 10 years, Simon Konecki, its spirit is one of musical play: the singer trying out different tones and techniques, from the jazz standards-inspired opener, “Strangers By Nature” to the loose, Honky Chateau-era Eltonisms of “I Drink Wine” and the sinuous flow of the delightedly sensual “All Night Parking,” which kicks off with a light-handed sample from the late Pittsburgh jazz great Erroll Garner and transforms it into a sample around which Adele wraps a vocal as light as twilight air.
The free musical mood of 30 correlates with the story it tells, of a breakup that’s more complicated than the ones Adele immortalized in high Romantic ballads like “Hello.” In her Oprah interview, Adele made it clear that she was the instigator of her divorce, not because Konecki, who remains a “best friend,” was abusive or neglectful but because she felt herself growing beyond the relationship.
“Cry your heart out, it’ll clean your face,” an auto-tuned phalanx of voices advises Adele in “Cry Your Heart Out” as she details her daily stumbles.
Adele has never truly orbited alone through pop’s omniverse — she began her career within a group of fusion-oriented singer-songwriters including Estelle, Rumer, Duffy and Corinne Bailey Rae, and now she’s connecting with a new wave of jazz-soul artists like Celeste and Sault .
Most telling, however, is her new partnership with Inflo, who helms three tracks, including the gospelized show-stopper “Hold On.” That production’s slow crescendo from a misty beginning, with its choir in the distance, to the familiar monumentalism of an Adele barn-burner does something to the form.
Adele still gravitates toward expertly rendered big flourishes — the couplet that grounds “Hold On,” “May time be patient / may pain be gracious,” is one of her best — but she is also learning that it can be fruitful to go small in a song, to write or sing something that puts aside the universal for the delicate, the offhand, the small gamble.