Adele’s ‘25′: A Track-by-Track Guide to the Year’s Most Anticipated Album

On Adele’s new album, 25, which should be inescapable at least through Christmas — Christmas 2017, that is — the changes are more micro than macro. The age has changed; the mood has not. Her album title history strongly indicates she originally intended all her records to be diaristic, yet there’s little, if anything, on this long-awaited return that reflects her current status of being a mum or even in a comfortable long-term relationship. Nearly all of it is about obsessive love, in the past tense… well, past tense for the love, not the obsession.

Anyone got a problem with that? If you were to survey her fans and see who has any objection to Adele sticking with lovelorn themes, you’d come up with lower polling numbers than Chris Christie’s. It’s a lonesome place, her wheelhouse, except for the tens of millions of people waiting on her every sublime, supple breath.

But if you’re wondering if the album should have been titled 21 and a Half, it’s hardly an exact copy, not when she’s newly bringing producers like Max Martin and Danger Mouse into the mix. Plus: themes, schmemes; producers, schmoducers! In the end these things are delivery systems in the service of pop’s most magnificent contemporary voice, which sounds even better four years after the throat surgery that threw us all into a brief panic.

Here, a track-by-track, first-impressions look at the 11 songs on 25:

“Hello"

Already familiar for weeks as a record-breaking download, this first single let everyone know that she wasn’t changing it up too much, in contrast for the poppier and less representative song she had thought about coming back with. “Hello” sets the path for much of 25 immediately: “I know it’s been quite a while, but I’m over it. No, seriously, I’m over it. Please, let me tell you how much I’m over it.” Never has the world been gladder that a gal doth protest too much.

"Send My Love (To Your New Lover)”

A familiar gambit, putting the most “fun” track in the second slot, just as “Rumor Has It” filled that space on the last album. This is, sadly, the only Max Martin/Shellback collaboration. Adele, who may not be the world’s most avid radio listener, admits she hadn’t even heard of them until she happened across Taylor Swift’s “I Knew Your Were Trouble” and demanded to know who was responsible. Martin and Shellback don’t offer Adele quite as dramatic a transformation as they did with Swift, but the results are charming enough that you can see why she almost made this the album’s premiere single. The title phrase seems to echo the I-wish-you-all-well wavelength of “Someone Like You,” but she’s clearly being ironic here, and the peppy music couldn’t more blithely fit that sarcasm. “Send My Love” marks the only time Adele plays acoustic guitar on the album, effectively set up against simple electronic percussion. Toward the end, things get lusher, with nearly choral vocals working against the beat to achieve a gentle, almost South African-sounding polyrhythm.

“I Miss You”

Paul Epworth, who served as co-writer and/or producer on three tracks on 21, returns for three more here. “I Miss You” is a lot more subdued than their world-changing “Rolling in the Deep,” but it has that some identifiable production depth, for lack of a better word. This put-your-headphones-on highlight was recorded at a place called the Church Studios, and it sounds like it was made in a church, too, with the hint of a few centuries’ worth of spectral voices rolling around somewhere in the mix. Not that Adele exactly means to be “spiritual” when she’s singing “I want to step into your great unknown,” not when she’s also yearning for “your body standing over me.” This might be the most overtly erotic song Adele has ever recorded… even if the Eros exists strictly in memory.

“When We Were Young”

Now that she’s an old, old lady of 27, you can see why Adele feels nostalgic for a time “when we were young.” But we all know that Adele is ageless, so you can probably find your way into this wistful ballad whether you’re her age or an even more elderly 30. “I still care/Do you still care?” she asks – and if you don’t, you’ve either got a heart of stone or, more to the point, a serious tin ear. Because this future hit features what are easily Adele’s most transfixing vocals on the album, as she lets a little more edge into the low range of her voice before unexpectedly hitting a diva high note at the 3:50 mark. Having reached it, she doesn’t milk it, and that’s why the world loves Adele.

“Remedy”

The album has three numbers where Adele is essentially accompanied by a solo instrument, the first of them being this collaboration with Ryan Tedder, where we get to experience the pleasures of a really well-mic’d piano. (There are supposed to be a couple of electronic keyboard parts in there, too, but they’re so subliminal you’ll have to put your pro headphones on to hear them.) It’s also one of two lyrically happy songs on the album; Adele has said she was inspired by friends, relatives, her current beau, and her 3-year-old son to proclaim “no river is too wide or too deep for me to swim to you.” Sing it, ma.

“Water Under the Bridge”

A second collaboration with producer/co-writer Greg Kurstin (who also handled “Hello”) feels like a standard ballad that’s been beefed up with a strong beat to almost flirt with being pop-gospel. Don’t let the cheerful arrangement fool you into thinking that Adele is going to sing two contented songs in a row. “Don’t pretend that you don’t want me,” she begs The One Who’s About to Get Away. The sentiment may be intense, but the music feels lightweight enough that there’s a reason why this has been placed exactly in the middle of the album.

“River Lea”

It was probably just coincidence that Adele sequenced three songs in a row focused on water imagery. This is the best of them, with producer Danger Mouse offering a feel that’s closer to “swampy,” even if the actual title river in the U.K. is hardly marsh-like. Mr. Mouse starts it off with a succession of dramatic, sustained organ chords that immediately set the track a-brooding, before Adele comes around to blaming her dark spirit on the climes that produced her. “There was something in the water that’s now in me… My heart is a valley, it’s so shallow and man-made,” she sings, in the album’s most vivid set of lyrics. While “River Lea” will almost surely never be a single, it’s likely to stand as one of 25’s most compulsively repeatable tracks.

“Love in the Dark”

The album’s lone orchestra-accompanied track has a lot of strings attached. Meanwhile, the verses are about cutting them. Having spent so much time in her musical career having been the dump-ee, Adele plays the dump-er here: “Take your eyes off me so I can leave/I’m far too ashamed to do it with you watching me,” she begins. She does eventually veer into lyrical cliché, as she often does — there needs to be a law against anyone using the phrase “cruel to be kind” ever again — but it’s still interesting to hear Adele grapple with what it takes to take off.

“Million Years Ago”

Kurstin ties with Epworth in getting three tracks on the album, and while it’s understandable why fans might be partial to “Hello,” “Million Years Ago” is really be the highlight of their collaborations. Performed with just acoustic guitars and bass, it has a ‘60s/Latin flavor, albeit one that’s subtle enough that you aren’t waiting for Sergio Mendes to walk in the door. You can easily imagine Kurstin performing it as part of his duo, the Bird and the Bee, except that these lyrics probably couldn’t have come from anyone but Adele. It seems to be the one time on the record Adele addresses anything having to do with her celebrity: “I miss the air, I miss my friends/I miss my mother, I miss it when/Life was a party to be thrown/But that was a million years ago.” (If she feels that old sometimes, at least it didn’t lead her to title the album 1,000,000.)

“All I Ask”

Bruno Mars co-wrote, but does not appear on, this front-runner for Best Song of the Album stripes. Did we say contender? No, it’s really not even that much of a contest. Lyrically, this is very much in the vein of every single woman’s favorite oldie, “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” with Adele begging, “If it’s my last night with you/Hold me like I’m more than just a friend/Give me a memory I can use/While we do what lovers do/It matters how this ends/’Cause what if I never love again?” That last line is unbelievably corny — and also quite glorious, when it’s Adele singing it like she really might be belting out the last useful breaths of her soon-to-be-pointless life. There is even a key change near the finale to send the tune into overdrive, as if it weren’t already in emotional sixth gear. In a different era, Melissa Manchester would have been singing it, Richard Perry would have filled the studio with 40 musicians, and “All I Ask” would have the biggest AC hit of 1975-85. Yet Bruno Mars’s collaborators, the Smeezingtons, haven’t done any of that. The only accompaniment is Greg Phillinganes and Brody Brown’s twin pianos, which is a brilliant way of underplaying the song and somehow sending it even more over the top. As Bonnie Raitt would say, I can’t make you love this song, if you don’t… but I’m not assigning any such coercive limitations to Adele, who can beat the crap out of you.’

“Sweetest Devotion"

What’s this, a song that sounds both lyrically and sonically happy, to end the album? Better late than never. “Sweetest Devotion,” another Epworth collaboration, marks only the second time on the album that Adele has a full band behind her, and it gives this track the extra bit of swing or oomph it needs to go out on an uncharacteristic high. The drums kick in with the first chorus, reminding you how we’ve missed them amid all these electronically enhanced or altogether percussion-less tracks, and we even get a few “woo-hoos” accompanied by a bit of guitar jangle. The words are not terribly original — this is the second time on the album Adele sings about someone who “feels like home” — but you can forgive a lot of lyrical unoriginality for the way every phrase Adele sings sounds like it, and she, have just been born.

And hopelessly devoted just about covers it, as the likely reaction goes, whether or not this album has its own “Someone Like You.” Adele isn’t allowing 25 to go out on streaming platforms. But maybe there should just be a stalking platform instead? Because whether it sells a record number in its first week or just, like, a million and a quarter, it’ll be a warm day in West Norwood before fans stop being obsessed with the 21st century’s most beloved obsessive.