The whole thing sounds like the personal/maternal reckoning of the club-going lady from Drake’s “Marvins Room,” and it also sounds unabashedly personal and stridently messy, as Adele records go.

Not all of it works, and it’s all quite chaotic, but you couldn’t accuse any of it-not one luxurious, immaculately sung second of it-of complacency. As a purely musical matter, Stupendously Sweet to Stupendously Mean is quite the whiplash transition, but given the news that Adele prevailed upon Spotify (which owns The Ringer) to remove the Shuffle button from all album pages, it’s clear that 30’s precise track list, and the emotional chaos in which it revels, is of paramount importance to her. That’s what I get for trying to mine this record for tabloid intrigue. It’s so hard to digest, usually I’m best aloneīut every time that you text I want to get on the next flight homeĪ further wrinkle, though: Per this month’s Rolling Stone cover story, “Woman Like Me” is not about her ex-husband, Simon Konecki, nor is “All Night Parking” about her new boyfriend, Rich Paul, and in fact both songs are about a mystery guy she dated in between, and so really we’re dealing here with a brisk two-song suite about a post-divorce love affair that started with butterfly-inducing promise but quickly collapsed into exasperated despair, so then she started sitting courtside with LeBron’s agent instead. It’s all happenin’ so easily (like, oh my God) I don’t know how you got through to me (I’m so cold) And plenty apt, too, given the coquettish jazz-club lilt with which Adele purrs the verses (complete with even flirtier backing vocals): “Woman Like Me” is immediately preceded by “All Night Parking (With Erroll Garner) Interlude,” a lovely and amorous detour (produced, as is more than half the record, by frequent Adele collaborator Greg Kurstin) drenched in sun-shower piano arpeggios (courtesy of vibey Michigan musician Joey Pecoraro’s 2017 sample of a blissed-out 1964 jam from jazz pianist Erroll Garner), and I think you’ll agree that “The Stupendously Sweet Song” is a way less confusing title for that one. “Woman Like Me” (one of three tracks produced by Inflo, from the fantastic British R&B collective Sault) is by far the most confrontational moment on 30, which vacillates between abject loneliness and steely resignation, between fresh-divorcée frivolity and bleary hangover piteousness, between fixation on a past love and cautious exaltation over a new one.

Send my love cover adele 11 year old