On ’30’, Adele Finds The Love Within The Heartbreak
On her most emotionally mature album yet, Adele proves that separation isn't selfish - it's just motivated by a different type of love.
Infinite Pop is a Music Junkee column about the past, present, and possibilities of pop music.
From the very first note Adele sings on 30, it feels like you’ve stepped onto hallowed ground.
Six years after her last album, 30 arrives in the wake of huge tectonic shifts in the world, the music industry, and her personal life alike. In Adele’s return to the public eye, a backstory’s emerged: that she wrote the album for her nine-year-old son Angelo. She hoped that one day, he could listen to 30 and understand why she chose to end her marriage to his father, sacrificing their stability for her own long-term happiness.
What matters, though, isn’t the public narrative — it’s the overwhelming sensation of beauty as you hit play on track one, ‘Strangers by Nature’. Gone is the turmoil of her past openers, ‘Rolling in the Deep’ and ‘Hello’. Her voice soft and close to the microphone, Adele serenades us over organ and golden-age Hollywood strings, courtesy of Donald Glover collaborator and Black Panther composer Ludwig Goransson.
She opens with an unusually florid image, the kind you need to double back on to fully understand: “I’ll be taking flowers to the cemetery of my heart/For all my lovers in the present and in the dark…” Throughout the song, she mourns, then honours the death of her marriage.
As the song closes, Adele anticipates her story to come: “I hope that someday I’ll learn / To nurture what I’ve done”. She takes a moment for herself, in her casual speaking voice — “Alright then, I’m ready” — before crossing the threshold.
Over The Rainbow
The lead single, ‘Easy on Me’, felt instantly familiar: with nothing more than a piano ballad and a black-and-white video, Adele effortlessly resumed her cultural dominance. The truth is, it is classic Adele, but for the subtle ways in which it’s not.
Framed by ‘Strangers by Nature’, ‘Easy on Me’ sounds even better as track two. She sings, knowing that the dream of her marriage is dead, but her future is not — as long as she can find the strength to swim.
Adele’s voice is so recognisable that we tend to forget that she’s kind of an odd vocalist. Here, instead of singing atop the clocklike rhythms of ‘Someone Like You’, she weaves in and amongst the piano chords, an instrument herself. Few singers have so many colours to their voice: from her blend of British and American soul enunciation to the way she jumps between her rich mid-range, tense high belt, and head voice — sometimes within the same word. Every Adele performance feels spontaneous, as she told US Vogue: “I never redo my vocals. Never. Never ever.” No other singer makes remotely similar choices — she’s truly inimitable.
‘Easy on Me’ was written for her son, but its lyrics — “There ain’t no room for things to change / When we are both so deeply stuck in our ways” — aren’t exactly relatable for a nine-year-old. And the title phrase — “Go easy on me” — is almost, but not quite, an apology. Really, the song is about Adele learning to forgive herself. She can hammer home a breakup like no other singer alive, but on 30, she’s become the gentlest bearer of bad news.
Devil In The Details
Adele is often characterised as middle-of-the-road, musically conservative — which is true, if you always value innovation over emotional expression. Yet it’s undeniable that with each album, Adele and her collaborators have found more intimacy, nuance, and joy in the details of their productions.
On track three, ‘My Little Love’, Adele begins to plumb the depths of the so-called “divorce record”. In Vogue, she cited Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On as an influence, but 30 is more Here, My Dear — the album where Gaye proved that heartbreak can be every bit as indulgent a subject as romance.
‘My Little Love’ finds Adele floating in an ocean of sadness: lush orchestral strings atop a light trip-hop beat. She ends each verse with a confession: “I know you feel lost, it’s my fault completely”, then a voice note dialogue with her son — then a breathtaking chorus where her backing vocals lift her up: “Mama’s got a lot to learn (Teach me!)”.
But there’s no resolution. Each time, the song simply returns to another verse, another set of anxieties. Grief is circular — sometimes, there can be no progress until you allow yourself to wallow on ‘Cry Your Heart Out’, she makes coping with feelings of depersonalisation sound, honestly, kinda fun — over a jaunty Motown-reggae production. ‘Oh My God’ finds her newly single, excited and terrified to experience something new — which mirrors the Greg Kurstin-produced track, as it builds from a bluesy ‘Rolling in the Deep’ stomp to a groovy, house diva chorus.
And on the album’s lone Max Martin/Shellback collaboration, the titular chorus is flirtatious — “Can I get it right now? / Let me, let me just come and get it!” It sounds like a song about hooking up, but the verses find Adele desperate for a real romantic connection. By the jazz-inflected ‘All Night Parking’, she’s found something like love again, and the results are pure sensuality — for the first time in her career.
‘I Drink Wine’ has her wondering, “Why am I obsessin’ about the things I can’t control?/Why am I seekin’ approval from people I don’t even know?” The music has a soulful ’70s Elton John swing, ’70s swing, and the tone of her voice is reassuring — but the words sit on a knife’s edge of sadness and uplift. It’s exactly 50/50 throughout. ‘Hold On’ does the same, but bisects those emotions into blues verses and gospel choruses, the same way Bruce Springsteen and Jack Antonoff do.
Those contradictions make even the smaller songs great; they’re songwriting techniques that she wasn’t yet deploying even on 25.
Maturity
On her first two records, especially the blockbuster 21, Adele’s appeal was in the juxtaposition of her youth and her old-soul maturity. She seemed so mature, in fact, that it was hard to imagine how this wizened twenty-something’s perspective would change as she grew older.
In retrospect, 30 makes those albums, even the singles, feel almost naive. Of course, 19 and 21 remain essential parts of Adele’s journey. Revisiting them, there’s still the gracefulness of her voice, but the bluntness with which she wielded her emotions has become more apparent. Adele had more in common with emo or early Taylor Swift than people cared to admit.
She’s grown enough to feel empathy, even in sour times.
She returns to a similar headspace on ‘Woman Like Me’, which feels harsh at first glance: “Complacency is the worst trait to have, are you crazy?… / It is so sad a man like you could be so lazy”. Yet the vocals are sung with care; they’re tough love, directed at an ex-husband for whom she holds no hate. She’s grown enough to feel empathy, even in sour times.
At the tail end of 30, Adele finds her way back into one last ballad, a song so intimate she may never perform it live. ‘To Be Loved’ isn’t just the album’s climax, it feels like the culmination of her career to date. Over a lone piano, she acknowledges her decision to end her marriage one more time: “Let it be known that I will choose to lose/It’s a sacrifice, but I can’t live a lie”.
Through the bridge, she pushes her voice to its absolute limit, trying to will herself into a better outcome, to change the past through sheer exertion. Such is the magic of music; that Adele can move countless listeners, people who’ll never know her, to tears. But ultimately, she’s still just moving air molecules. There was no solution to her knot of a flawed marriage. So life goes on, and she does what she knows how: she continues to sing. “Let it be known, let it be known that I tried!”
After all that, the closing track ‘Love Is a Game’ delivers a neat coda: “Love is a game for fools to play/And I ain’t fooling again/What a cruel thing/To self-inflict that pain”. With its cinematic strings, it’s — ironically — the most optimistic-sounding song on the album. But with one last flourish, she reveals: “Oh, you know I’d do it all again/I love it now like I loved it then/I’m a fool for them!” Was it all a lie? The song fades out prematurely. Behind the scenes, Adele’s probably cackling.
The Odyssey
Each of Adele’s albums is its own emotional odyssey, in the ancient Greek sense of the word. After enduring trials and tribulations, the protagonist returns home, changed as much as the world around them.
30 is an especially imperfect circle; it contains no lessons or morals. Adele remains true to herself throughout, learning only one thing: emotional resilience. So when the dust settles, she’s proved, at least to herself, that her decision was right — that separation need not be selfish, it can be motivated by a different kind of love. The marriage is gone, but the individuals endure.
What is it that makes Adele so special? Her level of emotional precision is uncommon, but it’s not unusual — it’s a vein many artists tap into. Though 30 contains some of her most evocative images, she’s never been a particularly poetic lyricist. She’s certainly not any “better” at navigating relationships than anyone else. What’s special about Adele is how gently she can hold your emotions, whether the audience is her son, an ex-lover, or yourself.
30 is accompanied by two TV specials, the first notable concert films shot post-COVID. For that alone, they’re worth your time. One Night Only, hosted by Oprah, uses Los Angeles’ iconic Griffith Observatory as backdrop; while An Audience with Adele, for the UK’s ITV, takes place at the more intimate London Palladium. The former is more grand, more Hollywood; the latter is uniquely British, an often hilarious homecoming full of crowd banter.
Adele’s as natural a performer as ever, but she’s not effortless — nor has her voice ever been 100 percent technically perfect. In the ITV special, she even restarts ‘Easy On Me’ in the middle of the first chorus, citing nerves that aren’t visible to anyone else. There was no obligation to leave in that footage, but it’s refreshing — especially when live performances are increasingly, noticeably tuned in post-production.
Half the appeal of the specials is crowd-watching — seemingly every living celebrity is in attendance, dressed to the nines. But unlike at the Grammys, Oscars, VMAs, there’s none of the performative jostling that comes with people competing for awards. Regardless of genre, everyone from Drake to Andrew Lloyd Webber is simply there to worship at the church of Adele. Not even Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga commands such universal appeal.
In one of her definitive moments, Adele pauses the L.A. show to accommodate a public proposal. The setting is almost comically grandiose, but there’s no vanity to the proposal — it feels sincere. As the lights come back on, revealing Adele and a gaggle of onlookers, she serenades the couple with Bob Dylan’s ‘Make You Feel My Love’. It’s extraordinary, but is it a touch ironic coming from a recently divorced woman?
On behalf of Adele, I’m here to argue that it doesn’t matter. Beauty is in the truthfulness of the moment, whatever happens next. A proposal doesn’t preclude the possibility of turmoil in the future. On the other hand, ‘Someone Like You’ never ruled out a future where Adele could be happy. 21, blockbuster that it was, didn’t mean that her best couldn’t be yet to come.
We understand all of these things to be true, that life and art can be as beautiful as they are contradictory. To quote another great diva, do you believe in life after love?
Richard S. He is doing better than they ever were. They tweet at @rsh_elle.