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Nov 17, 2021For Adele, 30 is an emotional breakthrough — a refreshingly candid body of work that is revelatory. While the album is about “divorce, babe,” the record’s 12 songs go deeper.
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Nov 16, 2021Adele has never sounded more ferocious than she does on 30—more alive to her own feelings, more virtuosic at shaping them into songs in the key of her own damn life. It’s her toughest, most powerful album yet.
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Nov 16, 2021This is certainly her strongest album yet, a work of catharsis, therapy and succour. It does what pop music is greatest at: gathering up emotions, focusing them and pouring them out to songs that everybody can sing, but few can sing quite as well as Adele.
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Nov 17, 2021An album that meets the breach with enough wrenching, life-and-death drama to leave you completely spent by the time its hour is up, then ready to immediately reinvest. Because, besides being that exhausting, it’s also that good.
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Nov 23, 2021The richest and most musically adventurous album of her career.
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Nov 19, 2021A surprisingly personal album that showcases how Adele has matured, both as an artist and as a person, since the middle of the last decade. She could have built on her blockbuster success in a cynical way, copy-and-pasting "Rolling in the Deep" and "Hello." Instead, she lets her emotions guide her, with triumphant results.
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Nov 22, 2021Adele has deepened the niches that made her preceding songs so powerful. But instead of playing it safe with only those established tricks, her bold exploration of new terrain on "Cry Your Heart Out" and "Oh My God" help Adele not only become the world's top hitmaker, but also a pop music visionary.
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Nov 19, 2021While more sonically ambitious in moments with bits of synth and vocal effects, 30 mostly stays the course of past Adele works: undeniable melody over gimmicks, piano and guitar built to transcend.
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Nov 19, 2021Meeting titanic expectations, this linear journey of the heart is Adele's most cohesive statement to date, pairing her inimitable voice with a dozen engrossing vignettes, reminding us that all we can do is keep trying.
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Nov 17, 2021Even as she sings about desperation and uncertainty, on “30” Adele’s voice is more supple and purposeful than ever, articulating every consonant and constantly ornamenting her melodies without distracting from them. Details are fastidious.
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Nov 16, 2021“30” offers deep thoughts on love’s causes and consequences. ... Adele’s singing — soaring yet pulpy, gorgeous even at its rawest (as in “To Be Loved”) — gives these musings the blood-and-guts believability her fans crave. There’s some of the brainy energy of Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” here, though it’s filtered through the homey wisdom of Carole King’s “Tapestry.” ... Until people stop breaking one another’s hearts, we’ll keep needing ugly-cry ballads — and nobody does those better than Adele.
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Nov 16, 2021The real masterstroke of ‘30’, however, comes with how these lyrics - the pain, the self-flagellation (sometimes cruel, often mocking), the hope, the acceptance - are expertly matched musically.
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Nov 22, 2021Now she has an album that ups the stakes and nuance of her artistry. Not just in telling a story over the course of 12 songs, or by making a record that interacts with more modern musical ideas, or in how she’s using her voice with newfound multitudes, but by being bold enough to share it all so vulnerably, with the entire world listening.
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Nov 22, 2021On 30, she displays the confidence to share her boldest vocal, stylistic, and thematic interests.
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Nov 22, 202130 overreaches for the rafters a little too often. But the sophisticated interplay of Adele’s nuanced vocal and the Garner piano sample here lingers long in the mind.
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Nov 17, 2021An album with novelistic depth, when ‘30’ turns once more for its London-rooted conclusion, Adele seems to reach a new level in her stratospheric career.
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Nov 16, 2021The songs themselves are good. Grounded in pathos, they tend to be handsomely crafted ballads about love and its various agonies – but it’s her vocals that sell them.
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Nov 16, 202130 sees Adele settle into the maturity and wisdom that the album presents, and truly is a coming of age. It is a well-considered progression for her, and while there are some missteps along the way, it is so good to see her moving forward.
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Nov 22, 202130 might not have been the cleanest of breakups, but it more than translates in lyrical form.
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Nov 22, 2021There are no glaring missteps, and it’s generally a very good effort from a singer who could have crumbled under the pressure of heightened expectations, but instead continues on the path she forged for herself.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 1,096 out of 1301
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Mixed: 80 out of 1301
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Negative: 125 out of 1301
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Nov 19, 2021
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Nov 19, 2021This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.
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Nov 19, 2021