By “Cry your heart out, it’ll clean your face,” Adele admonishes herself a third of the way through her fourth studio album – the first (after 19, 21, and 25) to feature an even number in the title. It’s a record in which Adele ugly-cries, then wipes off her streaked makeup, sloughing off layers of dead skin in the process: best experienced with a terrycloth flannel to hand and a goblet of something red as per track seven, I Drink Wine.
As should be clear to anyone with an internet connection, 30 deals with the year in Adele’s life when her wedding happened and her marriage fell apart. The singer, now 33, has explained as much to British Vogue and Oprah Winfrey – how, having been denied a happily-ever-after nuclear family as a child, she wanted one for her son, a regret amplified by the guilt of breaking it apart. Adele has also spoken of a long battle with anxiety (ameliorated by a tough exercise regime) and how her intention on these 12 songs was to explain things to her son, Angelo, whose questions crop up on the record. “Mummy is having some really big feelings right now,” she blurts, inadequately, on one of a series of voice notes.
We already knew Adele’s emotions are fathoms-deep and mountain-high; her vocal reach extends to the bits of stadiums only the pigeons and crane operators know. What’s new here is the extent of her self-flagellation, the rawness of her feelings, and how plaintive Adele’s pleas become for mitigating factors to be taken into account.
“I was still a child,” she mourns on Easy on Me; “no one knows what it’s like to be us,” she states on Strangers By Nature. She has opted for pianos, organs, jazz samples, and old-time pop classicism to express her misery, resilience, and – eventually – her openness to new love “in the highest count”. This is a classy album, if not quite a stone-cold classic.
On Strangers By Nature, the opening track, Adele establishes a Judy Garland atmosphere alongside film-scoring Childish Gambino producer Ludwig Göransson. Wrapped in Disney-soundtrack strings and flutes, the song sets up a melancholic, retro LA headspace, not entirely dissimilar to Billie Eilish’s on her recent album, Happier Than Ever.
Only a trio of tracks here makes any attempt to roll about in this deep. Cry Your Heart Out packs a little retro perkiness, echoing Amy Winehouse, while Oh My God details Adele’s shock at a new relationship, accompanied by more frisky production.
Mostly, though, this is a record that makes a beeline for the piano stool and stays there, with the odd acoustic guitar motif and vintage organ sounds as a supporting cast. The only way you know you’re in the 21st century is the rich millefeuille of multitracked backing vocals, a wall of sound made possible by technology.
But a new producer moves 30 on from previous Adele works. Joining the record’s big names – Greg Kurstin, Max Martin, Shellback, and returnee Tobias Jesso Jr – is fellow Londoner Dean Josiah “Inflo” Cover, whose recent hot streak includes several odd-number-themed albums with his own terrific outfit, Sault, plus albums by Michael Kiwanuka and Little Simz.
Adele has described her “six-hour therapy sessions” with Inflo, who steers most of the last third of this largely chronological record; he adds to the arsenal of Hammond B3s and Wurlitzers, piling the feelings ever skywards. The backing vocalists are often exponential in their heft. Better, though, are the occasions when there is a call-and-response of ad-libs between Adele and the choir. “How unbelievable of me to fall for the lies I tell,” she sings on Love Is a Game – “lies I tell!” echo the backing vocals.
But the defining characteristic of this album is its heft. The waterworks go all the way up to 11 on Hold On, whose hymnal qualities telegraph a faith that painful situations get better in time. Just when you think that Adele’s lungs can expand no wider, that every light on the recording console has fritzed out from the amplitude of this tune, along comes To Be Loved, in which she details her refusal “to live a lie”. “Let it be known that I tried,” sings Adele at gale force on what might be the Burj Khalifa of piano ballads.