This may well become the most famous pop greeting ever, muscling out dear old Lionel Richie. Adele is back, reintroducing herself with a slightly tentative “Hello”. Rarely has a single word been freighted with so much meaning and emotion. From the opening piano chord and that very first hello she sounds nervous, sad, determined. As the biggest pop star of our age arrives back on the stage, there’s no dramatic ta-ra, no thunder of bells and whistles. Rather, she dares to pull the world into her private sphere. 
 
 Why Adele turned to the Swedish pop magician Max Martin 
 
 Hello unfolds slowly. Despite conveying a mood of emotional uncertainty, it’s a supremely confident comeback, a monster ballad that creeps up on the listener, showing a persuasive degree of restraint. It rides on two ominous piano chords, orchestral strings shading the end of the first verse, swelling through the second, before the chorus arrives with a grave blast, the double thump of a bass drum and her voice jumping up a range. As the song circles around, everything gradually steps up a gear, the drums take on a ghostly skitter, a spooky keyboard floats in, backing vocals build until it moves towards a very luscious wall of sound, supporting but not overwhelming Adele’s utterly compelling vocal. A beautiful song of loss and regret, it takes a grip on the kind of memory every listener holds somewhere in their heart and merges it with Adele’s own drama. This sense of everywoman emotion is what people always responded to in Adele, she is a pop diarist, sharing the simple secrets of her heart with no pretence. 
 
 A beautiful song of loss and regret, it takes a grip on the kind of memory every listener holds somewhere in their heart and merges it with Adele’s own drama. 
 
 Everything people like about Adele’s vocals can be heard on this recording: emotional veracity, directness, melodic elegance, a balance of intimacy and fireworks. It is full of phrases that might have just been dropped into a spoken conversation, notably the moment when she acknowledges: “It’s so typical of me to talk about myself.” And then there’s that very unpretentious delivery, where she twists syllables and sounds like someone you might meet at a bus stop suddenly pouring her heart out. The moment that is most purely Adele is when she takes us out of the song by turning the word “anymore” in “any-mow-ow” before rising to plaintive Roy Orbison-esque falsetto, like a cross between an Eastender and a Hollywood diva. 
 
 Credit: © CAMERA PRESS/Jesse John Jenkins 
 
 Written with Greg Kurstin, the California producer who gets everywhere these days (Lily Allen, Lana Del Rey, Years & Years), Hello is a class act, an old fashioned ballad that never hurries, never overdoes it, but delivers the raw, honest feeling that has made Adele a superstar. In today’s overcooked climate of histrionic plastic pop excess, it unfolds like a breath of pure pop oxygen. ||||| It’s finally here! Last night, Queen Adele dropped “Hello,” the debut single from the singer’s forthcoming album 25, and her first new track since she was commissioned to write the theme for the 2012 James Bond flick Skyfall. There has been a lot of hype for this record—it’s a follow-up to 2011’s Grammy-sweeping 21, which also happens to be the highest-selling album of the past decade—without much more than a list of rumored collaborators to show for it. (Back in August, Billboard reported that Danger Mouse, Max Martin, Tobias Jesso Jr. and “Rumour Has It” songwriter Ryan Tedder had worked on new music with Adele; that story and a few online teases was all that fans had to go on.) But it’s real! In an open letter posted on Twitter earlier this week, the British songwriter apologized for the delay—she’s now 27, for what it’s worth—and described the emotional thrust behind the record: 
 
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 My last record was a break-up record and if I had to label this one I would call it a make-up record. I’m making up with myself. Making up for lost time. Making up for everything I ever did and never did. But I haven’t got time to hold on to the crumbs of my past like I used to. What’s done is done. Turning 25 was a turning point for me, slap bang in the middle of my twenties. Teetering on the edge of being an old adolescent and a fully-fledged adult, I made the decision to go into becoming who I’m going to be forever without a removal van full of my old junk. [...] 25 is about getting to know who I’ve become without realising. And I’m sorry it took so long, but you know, life happened. 
 
 “Hello” itself is a reminder of exactly why Adele so easily outsells her peers. It’s a heart-wrenching ballad about a woman who’s nostalgic for the not-so-distant past: She regrets the way things went down with an ex-lover and wants to apologize, but knows that too much time has passed for her to bother trying to fix it. It’s a soulful easy-listening jam with a thunderous hook—a classic Adele sing-along if ever there was one. Watch the video, which features Mack Wilds (!!!), below. 
 
 Adele’s 25 will be released on November 20th on XL/Columbia. 
 
 
 
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 Absence has a way of ossifying an idea and amplifying a legend. Those have been gifts for Adele, who has just returned after a break of almost five years with her third album, “25” (XL/Columbia). 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Her place in pop music held steady as she retreated from the spotlight, toward a more nourishing life that includes motherhood. And time has fixed the idea of Adele’s sound, leaving a brightly blinking beacon for her to return to. 
 
 To that end, “25” manages to sound all of a piece, even as the songs veer from phenomenal to tepid. In places, everything comes together. “Million Years Ago” bursts with melodrama and perhaps has a quiet echo of Mariah Carey’s “My All” amid the flamencoesque guitar. 
 
 “Hello,” the album opener, begins with melodramatic, earnest piano (as do several other songs), followed by an invitation: “Hello, it’s me/ I was wondering if after all these years you’d like to meet.” 
 
 This is Adele at her savviest: “Hello” functions as an extended hand to old fans and also a seeming chapter-closer on the relationship that defined “21,” her last album. 
 
 And by midsong, she is also at her best: Even when she is singing at her most powerful — “Hello from the other siiiiiide, I must have called a thousand tiiiiiiimes” — she’s never anything other than calm. 
 
 That is Adele’s gift. On songs like “I Miss You” and “Water Under the Bridge,” she renders the most acute pain with severe clarity and composure. If her singing wasn’t so loud, it would be tranquil. In places, on “Hello” and “Million Years Ago,” so total is her chill that she recalls a far less technically accomplished but even more steadfastly serene singer: Lana Del Rey. 
 
 And so firm is her vision that it rescues unambitious songs like “Remedy,” written with and produced by Ryan Tedder, and “River Lea,” written with and produced by Danger Mouse, which might otherwise drown in numbing organ. “Love in the Dark,” about the last embers of a dead relationship, moves at a funereal pace, but Adele issues her self-loathing like a command: “Take your eyes off of me so I can leave/I’m far too ashamed to do it with you watching me.” 
 
 Pop moves and mutates, but Adele more or less does not. Naming her albums for different ages in her life doesn’t indicate radical changes from era to era, but rather reinforces the reassuringly slow march of time. Her music is like time-lapse photography of a busy street: Small parts move, but the structure of the whole picture remains essentially intact. 
 
 What sets her apart, though, are those steady parts: a gargantuan and smooth voice, deployed with casual control and a cathartic fluency with heartbreak. 
 
 On “25,” she remains a plainly declarative singer (and songwriter — she has a writing credit on every song on this album). She’s emphatically firstperson and doesn’t get belabored or obstructed by metaphor or concept. She also offers little in the way of emotional surprise: For Adele, distress is restorative. (The album closes with “Sweetest Devotion,” a blast of optimism so ecstatic and saccharine it threatens to upend the 40 minutes of anguish that preceded it. ) 
 
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 Where “21” made gestural concessions to contemporary pop music, “25” largely does not. It comes closest on “Send My Love (to Your New Lover),” which was produced by Max Martin and Shellback. They haven’t varnished Adele, the way they have with so many before her. The song begins with a stray studio comment from Adele — “Just the guitar. O.K., cool” — before about a minute of acoustic guitar and what sounds like hand-played percussion. This is Adele the pop refusenik, still intact. 
 
 But then the thickly layered harmony vocals and fuller arrangement arrive, faintly echoing the thunderous drop in “I Knew You Were Trouble,” by Taylor Swift, another singer whom Mr. Martin and Shellback have compressed for pop consumption and extruded new things from. There is a Swiftian moment, too, on the song’s chorus, when she sings “lover” like a cheerful taunt — usually Adele’s message is one of shared melancholy; it’s refreshing to hear her sass. (It’s also more in line with her off-record persona; she exudes off-the-cuff charm. At a taping for a television special at Radio City Music Hall on Tuesday night, she was chipper and affectionately profane, joking about kicking off her shoes and commenting that since she had to have her nails removed so she could play guitar, she had “potato fingers.”) 
 
 It suggests, also, that Adele is not wholly impervious to influence, not bigger than her songs. Take two very different examples on “25” that show different versions of this. “When We Were Young” was written with Tobias Jesso Jr., the cloying Eagle Rock Randy Newman with stars in his eyes and a droop in his voice. In the verses, she sounds comfortable, but when she slips in to the chorus — “You look like a movie, you sound like a song” — she echoes Mr. Jesso’s vocal gestures, better suited to a voice that’s thin like his, and needs exaggeration, than one as rich as hers. It sounds like Adele singing a Tobias Jesso Jr. song, not Adele singing an Adele song. 
 
 Contrast that with “All I Ask,” produced by the Smeezingtons, Bruno Mars’s crew, and written by Adele with Mr. Mars, Philip Lawrence and Christopher (Brody) Brown. It’s a Streisandian tale full of harrowing, exquisite loneliness: 
 
 I will leave my heart at the door 
 
 I won’t say a word 
 
 They’ve all been said before, you know 
 
 So why don’t we just play pretend 
 
 Like we’re not scared of what is coming next 
 
 Or scared of having nothing left 
 
 At the beginning of the pre-chorus, Adele sings, almost offhandedly, “Look don’t get me wrong I know/There is a tomorrow,” holding the last syllable out until it decays. It’s a palpable gear shift, a form of singing that’s as confident in attitude as in acuity, and it enlivens this song to something like a masterpiece. Mr. Mars and his pals have extracted some new vim from Adele. For this, they should get a MacArthur grant, or an M.B.E. from the Queen. All together, they have made a mold-breaking song, one that’s even bigger than the legend. ||||| British singer Adele is back with her first single in nearly four years. 
 
 The song, “Hello,” debuted Friday, and its music video has already been viewed roughly 18 million times on YouTube. Adele also announced that her long-awaited third studio album, 25, would be released on November 20. 
 
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 In addition to the eye-popping viewership, the singer’s new music video made history by becoming the first music video to be shot partially using IMAX cameras. According to Entertainment Weekly, Canadian director Xavier Dolan met Adele last summer and got to hear the new song before almost anybody else. 
 
 “It was a privilege to direct the music video for Adele’s beautiful, heartbreaking song ‘Hello,’” the director said in a statement. “When I first heard it, all the images appeared clearly in my head – and her trust and generosity allowed me to work with abandon artistically and emotionally, like she always does. It made me extremely proud.” 
 
 The video features Adele deconstructing a failed relationship with an ex-boyfriend, played by The Wire actor Tristan Wilds. 
 
 In a post to her social media accounts on Friday, Adele said that, while her Grammy-winning 2011 album 21 was a “break-up record,” 25 is a “make-up record.” 
 
 “25 is about getting to know who I’ve become without realising,” the singer wrote. “And I’m sorry it took so long, but you know, life happened.” 
 
 Check out the video for “Hello” above.
– Adele is out with her first new song in three years, and the Internet is decidedly happy about it. Five reactions to "Hello," the first single from Adele's 25, which will be released Nov. 20: "The song [is] a heart-wrenching ballad about a woman who's nostalgic for the not-so-distant past," writes Puja Patel on The Concourse. "It's soulful, easy-listening with a thunderous hook—a classic Adele sing-along if there ever was one. ... [The song] is a reminder of exactly why Adele so easily outsells her peers." "Everything people like about Adele’s vocals can be heard on this recording: emotional veracity, directness, melodic elegance, a balance of intimacy and fireworks," writes Neil McCormick in the Telegraph. "'Hello' is a class act, an old fashioned ballad that never hurries, never overdoes it, but delivers the raw, honest feeling that has made Adele a superstar. In today’s overcooked climate of histrionic plastic pop excess, it unfolds like a breath of pure pop oxygen." USA Today has a roundup of excited tweets, and there are more where those came from. One of our faves, from Hunter Schwarz: "RT if you’re sitting at your desk listening to Adele crying. fav if you’re holding it all in, trying to keep yourself together." It's not just the song itself winning praise: "While the video is intimate, it also has an epic feel to it. That large-scale feeling is likely due to the fact that 'Hello' is the first music video to ever film with IMAX cameras. Leave it to Adele to come back in a major way," writes Vanity Fair's Joanna Robinson, who deems the video "technologically groundbreaking." MTV's headline: "Adele's ‘Hello’ Is Emotional, Heartbreaking And Will Leave You Drowning In Tears." And the deck: "It's just so good." Click to see what Adele has revealed about the rest of the album.