How about the choice to title a Doja Cat-dupe flex track “Nicole Kidman”? Surely this namedrop represents something relevant to the ADÉLA persona. Surely that something can’t begin and end with the couplet, “Moulin Rouge/My corset is so tight.” The point, one senses, is to get us clapping just like we do when Kidman shows up on the big screen at our local AMC. You can practically see ADÉLA sweat as she vies to become the next pop stan pet cause, but hardly any of this music is interesting or idiosyncratic enough to befit cult-fave status. Rosalía’s “Hentai” and Camila Cabello’s “Chanel No.5” should be careful near flights of stairs when ADÉLA’s “Hitachi” is around: Another racily Orientalist boudoir ballad has entered the villa. If only “Hitachi”’s scandalizing extended past its title; from an artist whose breakout single was roughly 30 percent moan, this counts as playing it safe.
Despite the Dare’s Harrison Smith and 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady in its credits list, PRIMA has the overriding flavor profile of a corporate slop bowl. Smith’s contribution, the single “KGB,” would be a welcome break from the homogeneity, were it not at the very top of the tracklist. His production is a real workout—a 2007-as-fuck mash-up of CSS and “Perfect (Exceeder)”—and ADÉLA’s “villain origin story” framing is cute, even as it once again relies on prior knowledge to fully grasp. On the other hand, you can hear the labored recipe testing that went into “Boys”: a dash of “Get Ur Freak On,” a pinch of “I’m a Slave 4 U,” three eyedroppers of “Goodies.” Together, those strong ingredients blend into focus-grouped muck. Turns out the fine line between expertise and taste is actually a chasm.
These days, the big pop album about becoming a pop star, and the miseries therein, is the big pop album’s default mode. Even so, “Therapy” takes the pervasive “therapy pop” trend to a discomfiting place. It’s barely a song at all, more a litany of traumas and anxieties: “My voice doesn’t really work,” “I’m pissed off at my dad,” “I miss when my little sister used to call me mom.” The tearful reality TV confessional—I’ve given up so much to be here; my whole family is counting on me—is a contemporary stock trope, but ADÉLA’s genuine panic is palpable. The baddest bitches may not be in L.A., but the gainfully employed ones certainly are. To quote a doyenne of competition shows, Heidi Klum: “One day you’re in. The next day, you’re out.” I believe it’s that gut-level fear that constricted the range of riskier, more exciting albums PRIMA could’ve been.
Glimmers of the PRIMA multiverse make it through to us—“KGB,” the all-too-fleeting contact high of “Marijuana,” and especially the “Ain’t in LA” video. In one shot, ADÉLA wears a bandeau top and flower crown and dances with a group of children in traditional Slovak folk costumes. It’s edgy (the kids all mime an explosion on the line “Light the cigarette with the propane”), editorial, and uniquely her. Most crucially, it constructs the character of “ADÉLA” within the vernacular of pop music and apart from her stint on Dream Academy. ADÉLA shares her fundamental struggle with another fictional ballerina, Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan: each a star pupil with little sense of who she is outside the studio. PRIMA wants so desperately to break bad, but its legs are locked in first position.
