It’s very rare that my personal investments in an early-career popstar are misguided. Partway through my first listen of Adéla’s debut album PRIMA, however, I found myself wishing that I had been more cautious with my holdings. 

A co-worker recently told me that people only enjoy Adéla because they like to be ahead of the entertainment curve. I didn’t necessarily agree with her. The singer’s mainstream popularity really started to take shape at the start of the year when she was opening for Demi Lovato and began to debut numbers from her upcoming full-length album. Singles KGB and Red Bottoms were the first taste of what Adéla’s could offer to the pop landscape, and it was quite a promising vision. Audiences were fascinated by the combination of her professional dance background with her Bangerz-esque edgy pop sensibilities, but I don’t think Adela herself was quite prepared to break through just yet.

Things seemed to shift upon the release of Ain’t In LA, the third single from the new album, an anthemic track designed to champion the talents of individuals who operate outside the parameters of the established music industry. It referenced the singer’s upbringing in Slovakia and assisted in distinguishing her from the rest of the pop market. Here was a new kind of popstar in active rebellion against the expectations of the industry, unafraid to represent the ugly side of reality. Ain’t In LA, however, was the beginning of the end of Adéla’s ingenuity, as the song’s popularity on TikTok seemingly awoke the singer’s label to her economic potential.

All this culminated with the release of PRIMA, Adéla’s debut album. It’s easy to tell from the get-go if a new release lives up to the expectations surrounding it, most recently seen in the mainstream with Olivia Rodrigo’s you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. PRIMA had the opposite effect. Adéla’s 2025 EP The Provocateur is filled front-to-back with electrifying pop tracks—“Superscar” remains the strongest number in her discography by a wide margin. PRIMA takes the work of The Provocateur and sanitises it for a broader audience, covering much of the same thematic material but with less capacity for distinction from the rest of the market.

The most glaring issue facing PRIMA is simply its lack of artistic substance. Adéla’s previous offerings combined infectious pop sensibilities with either thought-provoking theming or relentless energy. The track listing from the new album instead only goes through the motions of an career-defining record. “Nicole Kidman”, the single pushed alongside the release of PRIMA, appears to be the hopeful chart hit from the project but provides no reason as to why it deserves commercial or critical success. The song follows a simple premise—Adéla feels so successful and beautiful that she compares her life to that of the song’s titular actress. While it’s a bold and discursive move to name a single after an existing celebrity figure, the reason why Nicole Kidman was the recipient of this dedicated track is ambiguous. The actress’ celebrity image has never been particularly defined by the sort of behaviour Adéla describes on the track, “I wake up, the world is my buffet / I fly out, fuck up another stage / Babygirl in control, I feel like Nicole”. It doesn’t feel like this track was named after Kidman for any reason beyond the potential for rhyming “control” with “Nicole”. Her role in the song could easily have been filled by another celebrity with little change to the nature of the track itself, which suggests that this number was not an especially well-conceived one. 

The remainder of the album is mostly comprised of monotonous ruminations on Adéla’s relationships with various men in her life. From “I’m The Man” to “Boys” to “Fantasize” to “Starving Artist” to “Marijuana”, none of the tracks leave the listener with any distinct impression on who Adéla is as an artist and what she seeks to achieve with her music. “Starving Artist” is an especially egregious part of the singer’s brief discography, sounding like a poor imitation of an early Tate McRae song—not that those are anything to write home about either. Based on what we know from “Ain’t in LA”, one might assume that “Starving Artist” might be an introspective number about the struggles Adéla has gone through to find mainstream success, but in actuality it revolves around the singer returning to the arms of an old flame. None of this is to say that musicians aren’t allowed to release songs about their personal relationships, but after you’ve established yourself as a thematically complex artist, it’s disappointing to release an album full of typical tracks about sex and money.

None of this is to mention “Therapy”, which is possibly the most confusing number released by a major artist in some time. The song vaguely circles Adéla’s regrets surrounding leaving her family behind in Slovakia while she pursues music in the States, but approaches what is quite interesting subject material in the most brain-dead fashion possible. The song opens with “I can’t sing / I can’t really do anything right now that I want to do / Uh, my voice doesn’t really work / And I’m kind of pissed off.” What is she talking about! If nothing else, Adéla is clearly an economic priority for her label, and them allowing her to release a song with this degree of poor songwriting is befuddling to say the least.

PRIMA is one of the most disappointing pop albums in a long while. Adéla was once the progenitor of a new, bold subgenre of mainstream music, but with this project her artistry has been thoroughly stripped of any of the components that once made her such an immediate force in the industry. While PRIMA has not left us with a popstar, it has certainly left us with a product. Its songs are perhaps listenable enough to end up on playlists and radios, but no career has ever left a lasting impression on account of its palatability. For Capitol Records, Adéla’s artistry was more of an inconvenience.