The New Yorker:

Earlier this month, the normally social-media-shy Adele went on Instagram Live for the first time, gamely playing the Luddite and cheerfully bumbling through an emotionally warm but technologically glitchy Q. & A. with fans. Easily distractible and a bit frazzled, with little makeup on and her new puppies pattering noisily in the background, she answered innocent questions about her preferred cereal flavor, her favorite Amy Winehouse song, and whether she’d bring her tour to places like Brazil or South Africa. But when asked by one follower what inspired her new album, “30,”—which is to be released next month and is her first in six years—Adele got dead serious and gave the most direct answer possible. “Divorce, babe,” she said. “Divorce.”

To say that Adele is well equipped to handle a divorce album would be a grand understatement. There is perhaps no pop star of the modern era more single-mindedly devoted to matters of the heart than Adele, who has been steadily chronicling her own heartbreak since she was old enough to have her heart broken. She has pursued the topic of love, its agonies and ecstasies and aftermath, to the exclusion of everything else, which has made her the most reliable, traditional, and stylistically conservative pop star of the past two decades. In 2008, she released her début album, “19,” named after the age at which it was written. The record felt like a vocal portfolio of sorts, designed to showcase the range of Adele’s rich, smoky, and soulfully out-of-time voice. It was also a record that proved just how seriously British women were taking classic American soul and blues. The album showed not only what love and heartache could do for her voice but what Adele’s voice could do for the very ideas of love and heartbreak.

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