If you haven’t heard of Adéla by now, I guess you may have been hiding under a rock or taking the digital detox concept a bit too far. The pink-haired pop star with an undeniably bubbly, charismatic personality has been making waves this year, be it with viral sensation hits like Ain’t In LA or getting together with your fave new gen pop stars including PinkPantheress and Zara Larsson. Now, she’s ready to finally become the global pop star she’s always wished to be. Her debut album, Prima, is a solid testament to that.
There’s a moment in every aspiring pop star’s career when ambition stops sounding like wishful thinking and begins to resemble a plan. For Adéla, that moment is Prima. The Slovak singer’s debut album is not interested in pretending that success happened by accident: across eleven songs, she tells us exactly how badly she wants it, what it has cost her and how much fun she intends to have once she gets it. The title works twice over; this is her first full-length record, but it also nods to the prima ballerina, the position for which she has been training all her life.
That sense of discipline matters because Prima is a controlled introduction. Co-executive produced by Blake Slatkin and Dylan Brady, it moves with the confidence of a tightly choreographed show: the metallic, impatient pulse of KGB opens the curtain; Nicole Kidman, I’m The Man and Boys establish the star persona; then the album gradually lets desire, doubt and homesickness disturb the pose. The songs are short, hooks arrive quickly and the transitions rarely call attention to themselves. Yet the sequencing creates a clear emotional journey, from plotting a rise to asking what that rise has changed.
KGB is the ideal opening because it turns biography into mythology without sanding away the specifics. Adéla remembers herself as a European girl staring at a television screen until her eyes hurt, imagining a future much larger than the one available to her in her native Slovakia. The title is a joke, a threat and a reference to the Eastern European identity she refuses to package neatly for an American audience. When she presents ambition as something close to espionage, pop stardom becomes an operation: studied, rehearsed and executed with suspicious precision.
That knowingly constructed image continues on Nicole Kidman, a sleek fantasy about wanting to be looked at with the same fascination reserved for a film star. The accompanying Hannah Lux Davis-directed video understands the assignment. Adéla cycles through references to Eyes Wide Shut, Moulin Rouge!, Birth and Babygirl, with a wink to Kidman’s AMC advert. It’s glossy, absurd and funny — a celebrity moodboard brought to life by someone who knows that reverence is more entertaining when it includes dress-up.
Reality then improved the joke. At the London premiere of Practical Magic 2, Kidman revealed that she knew who Adéla was and planned to see her perform in Nashville. She had also used Ain’t In LA for her TikTok debut. Pop culture occasionally writes its own perfect press release, and this is one of those occasions. More importantly, the encounter mirrors the album’s central tension: Adéla sings about proximity to fame while fame itself begins to answer back.
The middle stretch is where Prima proves it can do more than maintain a fabulous pose. I’m The Man flips the language of masculine authority with a smirk, while Boys and Red Bottoms treat attraction and luxury as games in which Adéla would rather write the rules. On Starving Artist, one of the album’s sharpest lyrical ideas, financial precarity becomes sexual appetite: an empty bank account sits beside less empty promises. The innuendo is silly, but the class detail gives it bite. Hitachi pulls a similar trick, using a provocative punchline to disguise the loneliness left by someone who is no longer there.
Therapy removes most of that armour. Over conspicuous vocal processing, Adéla admits that her voice is failing her, that the men holding the keys to her future irritate her and that she can’t yet afford to move her mother closer. Most affecting is the image of a younger sister who once called her “Mum” and has grown to her height while she was away. The auto-tune makes insecurity audible, placing a synthetic shield around a confession that otherwise feels painfully exposed. After so much talk of control, the messiness is exactly what the record needs.
Then comes Ain’t In LA, a viral success and Adéla’s first entry on the Billboard Hot 100. Saving the album’s biggest song for last is a clever decision. Its bright, early-2010s pop rush sounds instantly familiar, but its rejection of Los Angeles mythology gives the nostalgia a personal angle. Adéla would rather remain a nobody than become interchangeable, she insists, turning the outsider status that once looked like an obstacle into a source of power. The track lands like both a finale and a thesis: she wanted the United States, reached it and discovered that arrival means little if you misplace yourself along the way.
Prima wears its references openly, and occasionally you can hear the scaffolding of other pop eras before you hear Adéla herself. But debut albums are allowed to reveal the search as well as the destination. What makes this one exciting is the friction between its immaculate surfaces and the person scratching beneath them: ambitious, horny, homesick, funny and unwilling to act grateful for merely being invited. Adéla does not yet need to be the prima of pop. On Prima, she sounds far more compelling: like someone determined to earn the title in public.
