Back in 2011 when Adele released her breakout album, “21,” I was 11 years old. I vaguely remember singing along to the hits, but what burns vivid in my brain is the way my mom loved — and I mean loved — that album. I didn’t quite get it. But, hey, I was 11.

Flash forward to 2015 when Adele’s next album hit the shelves. “25” had just come out, and I was now 15 years old. This time around, I got it a little more. I was a gawky freshman who thought she’d known the trappings of love — she hadn’t. But this time, I followed my mama’s lead and tried to listen to songs like “All I Ask” with her same pensive squint. All of the tracks were above the paygrade of a girl who still had stuffed animals strewn across her room.

Here we are now in 2021 with Adele’s latest release  in our laps as of Nov. 19. “30” just dropped, and I’m 20 years old. I’ve always been 10 years behind Adele in age and about 10 million years in maturity. I’m sure I’m just as naive as I’ve always been when the Adele releases come around, but when my mom and I gave “30” our first onceover, I finally felt as though we were on the same page as to how we listened. When spilling my thoughts on Adele’s latest LP, it only felt right that mother dearest weighed in with her 50 cents before I started writing.

Here we have a divorce album, an explanation of what looks like the final stage on Adele’s coming-of-age journey with love. In an interview with Vogue, she explained the purpose of “30” was to give her 9-year-old son Angelo clarity on why she divorced his father Simon Konecki— what we hear goes a hell of a lot deeper than just an “I’m sorry.”

Let’s backtrack. Adele’s “21” couldn’t have been more perfectly summed up by a title. While “21” has a mature feel, it’s basically a more articulated way of summarizing every romantic breakdown you’ve had as a college-aged kid. It’s explosive and juvenile, but in an addictingly painful way that’s well received by her target audience. She’s jilted, she’s scornful and, to the fault of her age, she’s wearing her heart on her sleeve and leaving too much on the table.

With “25,” her slightliness has mostly turned to sympathy. As a new mother, Adele originally intended this album to be about Angelo, but changed directions when she still had some unfinished business and qualms of love on her brain.
On “25,” she delivers potentially some of her best and most gut-wrenching work. In the same vein as her previous album, Adele laid out a ballad heavy sampler platter: some pettiness and a tiny bit of healthy simping, all coated in the main theme of nostalgia.

“30” feels like the only logical next move for her in some senses, but also throws us for a loop in others. The subject matter is for sure heavier, but according to me and mother dearest, the lyrics were filled with more cliches than ever before. Don’t get me wrong, on the album she penned some real bars like “Sometimes loneliness is the only rest we get” on “Hold On,” but at times it felt stuck in the obvious.

Maybe the bar is too high after her past two LP’s that at any scent of banality I give her a hard time, but I expected her to rip my heart out with this album and my chest stays intact. I’ll give her credit, though, she really went for something different with “30.” Whether it’s your cup of tea or not, you have to nod your cap to the queen of ballads for messing with pop textures, R&B aesthetics and even some jarringly obvious autotune here.

The lead single “Easy On Me” that preceded the album with an Oct. 15 release was the classic Adele I’d expected the whole thing to be chock full of. But as mama says, “artists evolve as they create”, and that’s what we saw in the bulk of the songs. In the album opener “Strangers By Nature,” Adele trades her usual pocket for the stylings of an old Hollywood waltz. It felt as if it was fit for a funeral dirge with the organ, but the juxtaposition of the chime moments felt a little too Disney for what I’d expected of the album.

Credit is due on the third track, though. The production team didn’t let any Mickey Mousing get near “My Little Love.” This was the first of the album’s long tracks, and this is where the dialogue between Adele and her son gets literal. She’s speaking right to him for us all to hear, utilizing old voiceovers she recorded the day she talked through the divorce to 6-year-old Angelo.

The melancholic slow outro jumps right into the fourth track so appropriately called “Cry Your Heart Out.” I see what she’s going for in this one; the track felt inspired by the keys of musicians like Keiger mixed with a little more pop than your average Adele track. I’ll leave it up to the listener to be the judge, but I’d say it missed the mark. This track was the first of a handful of songs on the album that in my mind were uncharacteristically “on trend” compared to the directions she’d previously taken on her prior albums. Though I didn’t instantly fall for her stab at trip-hop with “All Night Parking,” “Can I Get It” has been added to the permanent list of mama and my’s kitchen dancing tracks.

Aside from these surprise moments, there are definitely songs on the album that are as warmly predictable as your grandma’s house or your favorite sweater. “I Drink Wine” and “Hold On” give us the OG Adele that “Easy On Me” promised, as a nod to the grouchs like me who secretly only wanted a revamp of “25.” More so than her previous albums, the two-part closer “To Be Loved” and “Love is a Game” also bookends things really nicely in relation to the opener.

“30” wasn’t what I expected at all. But after sitting on it for over a week, I grow fonder with every listen. It’s a bold move to admit your shortcomings to the people you let down — and even bolder to spill your guts about your divorce on a record for the whole world to hear. Whether I dug every track on its own is obsolete to how I felt on the whole thing; it’s always great to hear some new Adele, and “30” sure scratched that itch for a while.