Day 380: ADÉLA – PRIMA
I’m going to be pivoting into featuring more of the newer stuff from now on – there’s just been so much music history to mine through before I get to the modern music, but I think it’s time, I’m branching out. To celebrate that, I’ll go for a very buzzy new pop star whose music has been pretty unavoidable for the past few weeks: ADÉLA.
Album cover courtesy of Capitol
ADÉLA was born in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2003. She started off as a ballerina who was harbouring secret dreams to become a pop star, stemming from watching a lot of Hannah Montana as a kid. She practiced English by watching American television shows and became fluent by the time she was nine years old. At 19, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in music, and landed on the competition reality TV show Dream Academy, where they were finding members to form the band Katseye. She was one of the first people to be eliminated from the show.
ADÉLA started putting out music as a solo artist shortly thereafter and generated enough buzz to catch the attention of Grimes, who produced a song for her for her 2025 EP, The Provocateur. In early September 2026, she released her debut studio album PRIMA, named after her ballet background to signify that even without Katseye, she’s at the highest possible level as a solo artist.
PRIMA is an interesting debut – occasionally it reminds me of pop greats, I hear a lot of Britney and some Jade here and there, and she’s arguably a very talented artist. And the production on this is great. There’s something very current about the sound of this album, they’ve really managed to nail something down that sounds very current but sometimes also reminiscent of old peak 2000s pop. It doesn’t sound like she’s trying to emulate any of the big names, it sounds like they inspire her sound but she’s using it to do her own thing. The potential with ADÉLA is very much there.
However, the real weak point of the album is that it suffers from a lack of substance lyrically. Some could argue that it’s probably not made for me, she’s a 22-year-old artist who’s making music for the other youths — at 17 years old, hearing a relationship compared to a pair of red bottom shoes or hearing a song that’s centred around the line “I'm like a spy, I studied this shit, call me the KGBitch” probably hits you like a ton of bricks, but in your 30s, it just sounds like there’s not much to grab onto. The latter one is crazy, by the way, and it’s not like she can claim ignorance about the Soviet Union, she’s a Slovakian who lived in Russia.
But then again, I’m not her target audience, it’s not made for me, I’m too long in the tooth to relate to any of this or find it particularly interesting. It’s clearly hitting a note with the kids, though, as many of her songs are going viral and with her becoming the first ever Slovak artist to chart on the Billboard 200.
I can clearly hear whispers of ADÉLA becoming an artist to watch, but she’s not there yet. And at the very least what she’s doing is leaps and bounds more interesting than Katseye, she might have lucked out by going out early. It’s good enough that I’m keen to keep an eye on what she’s up to in the future, but PRIMA is not quite good enough to stand up on its own just yet. 6.5/10.