30

Adele 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.

This 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.

An 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.

The richest and most musically adventurous album of her career.

A 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.

Adele 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.

While 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.

Meeting 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.

Even 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.

“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.

The 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.

Now 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.

On 30, she displays the confidence to share her boldest vocal, stylistic, and thematic interests.

30 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.

An 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.

The 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.

30 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.

30 might not have been the cleanest of breakups, but it more than translates in lyrical form.

There 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.

Despite her albums being snapshots, sometimes a little more diversity in subject matter would be a good thing. Ultimately, while some intriguing risks have been taken, 30 is probably the weakest, as well as conversely the most intimate and in many ways bravest, Adele album to date.

You couldn’t blame Adele for declining to even tinker with a formula that clearly ain’t broke. But she does, and it makes for 30’s highlights.