Adele’s Balladic Return: Something Like ‘Someone Like You’

Adele has kept us waiting four and a half years for a new album, so we shouldn’t be surprised when, at the start of the video for her new song, “Hello,” she’s determined to make us wait just a little longer, still.

There is sepia-toned silence as her car arrives at a remote country house, which turns out to be a lousy place to reach out and touch someone from her past, at least as far as cell signals go. “I just got here and I think I’m losing signal already,” she says into her flip phone. But while she waits for AT&T to build a new tower in the area, there are dust covers to be pulled off furniture, and old flames to be reignited. Literally! She switches on the burner on the gas stove right about the time the music finally kicks in.

Her old flame may not be coming back, but ours is.

Speaking of revisiting the past, “Hello” plays out exactly like an album track from 21, although it’s our first window into 25, the follow-up that’s due out November 20. “Hello” is the most anticipated song of the 2010s that is not by Taylor Swift, or maybe even the most eagerly awaited one if you include her only real rival at the top.

Will she have gone all EDM on us, you fear? Not to worry. She’s working with a new producer, Greg Kurstin (Sia, Kelly Clarkson), on this particular song, but the clear message of this very slow-building ballad, musically as well as lyrically, is that nothing has changed.

Over the simplest possible piano chords, Adele sings softly — as softly as someone with one of the great foghorn voices in pop history can — about lost love with very little to distract from the emotion, as even the first chorus has only the faintest trace of a bass drum for percussion. By the even more swelling second chorus, there’s some actual syncopation, and a few background oohs and aahs. Right about the time a key change should be kicking in, or some melismatic coloring… well, there’s none of that, because a queen doesn’t need those tricks. Adele takes your key changes and melisma, ladies, and stomps on them like a cigarette butt.

There is one surprise in the video, and it’s not a musical one, but a casting choice. We don’t see him until minutes into the clip, but her lost love turns out to be Tristan Wilds, of The Wire fame. What makes that choice unusual isn’t so much the interracial aspect as how much younger he seems (although in real life, at 26, he’s only a year behind her). Adele’s look and sound are so ageless that it’s tempting to start thinking of her as a Mount Rushmore figure alongside Streisand or Dusty Springfield. So giving her such a lively counterpart in the video instead of the moody male model of the moment helps reestablish her relative youth more than a numerical album title ever could. Still, you may wish Adele and Wilds actually interacted in the clip, instead of being separated by the sands of time (and, possibly, shooting schedules).

Adele has promised that 25 will be “a makeup album” instead of a breakup album, and the desire to reconcile runs strong throughout “Hello.” “I must have called a thousand times… but when I call, you never seem to be home,” she sings, sounding just a bit stalker-ish. At least she’s hounding him in the service of wanting to say “sorry,” whether that apology is falling on deaf ears and voicemail or not. That’s a progression from 21, when everything seemed to be the other guy’s fault. Now she’s not enraged but penitent… if maybe a little peeved that, now that’s come around to wanting to make amends, “it clearly doesn’t tear you apart anymore.” Lucky for us that, as she puts it, “I ain’t done much healing.”

There hasn’t been much on the pop landscape to distract us from our own longing for Adele. Even Sam Smith’s new Bond theme was an occasion to make us talk about how much better we all liked Adele’s last one. Does “Hello” satisfy that thirst? Not entirely. But initial singles off long-awaited projects tend to be more placeholders than revelations, and the list of rumored producers for the upcoming set has us licking our chops for what it might sound like if Adele really did hook up with Max Martin and Danger Mouse.

In the meantime, we’ll take something that brings back a sweet rush of 2011-12 nostalgia, even if it should be called “Something Like ‘Someone Like You.’”