“PRIMA” by Adela and the Growing Observation of Pop Artists

by Ebun Lawore, Bad Habits Editor

I feel like I never stop talking about how social media makes everyone so much more visible. Everyone is constantly sharing parts of themselves, and people are constantly interacting with us, and that kind of interaction has become this sort of social currency that is bleeding into so many areas of our lives. Lately, I find myself becoming more and more intrigued by the way that this changes our consumption of pop music. This past week, I have been observing this through how people are reacting to the sonics, promotional materials, artwork, and performances of Adela’s debut album, PRIMA.

I first started really listening to Adela’s music this past spring, but I had heard of her much earlier. It was soon after listening that I started getting deep into her lore by watching the show Dream Academy. For those of you who don’t know, Dream Academy is the pop-star bootcamp reality show that depicts a group of about 20 or so young girls competing for the six spots in the global girl group KATSEYE, being championed by major record labels Hybe and Geffen. Adela was a contestant on this show, and that is how began in the pop music industry. Ever since she was eliminated from KATSEYE, she has been working hard on creating a space for herself as a solo artist. But because of the visibility that the Dream Academy show gave, she has been doing this pretty publicly.

This “free publicity” that Adela got through Dream Academy was ultimately a great thing for her solo career. After the release of the show, a lot of people were paying attention to her and her process of rolling out her very first EP The Provocateur. And because of Dream Academy people were invested in the progression of her career. That interest in combination with the industrial, electronic, dance pop sound and unique and critical lyrics that permeated throughout The Provocateur project made for an incredible and fast break out. Emphasis on the fast.

I feel like nobody who is interested in Adela is talking about how weird it is that she has broken out in this way. Adela’s entire rise to fame beginning from actually completely unknown is being shown to anyone who comes across it online. From her own perspective, and from people as important as Netflix producers and Hybe record label executives, Adela is being HELLA perceived, and it’s lowkey making lots of people act really weird about her.

I honestly believe that artists should not be this publicly known before they really begin their breakout. And it hasn’t always been this way, but because social media has become such a huge factor in music discovery, record labels have discovered that you get optimal results when potentially artists are “released” to the public, through social media, before they even begin to make any music. This causes people to become more attached to ideas, and the concept, and characters, before they are ever even attached to the artist’s actual art.

This is not to say that Adela’s fans are not attached to her art, they definitely are. However, their over attachment to the idea of her can sometimes mess up their perception of her art.

Prior to the release of her newest album PRIMA, Adela has been going on a press tour talking about how she came up and where the album was coming from. In lots of the interviews, she talks about her upbringing and being obsessed with stars like Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, and Ariana Grande. It became clear that moving forward, she wanted to take more inspo from this 2010s era of pop music, and be that kind of popstar.

People are obsessed with the story of Adela’s rise. In their eyes, The Provocateur was the angsty release of a star who will constantly tell the story of being a small girl from Slovakia doing whatever it takes to be a popstar. People want Adela to be that Adela forever, and they want her music to reflect that feeling forever.

PRIMA doesn’t really reflect that feeling. She is clearly doing what she stated she would do, by making an album with songs that sound like “We Can’t Stop” by Miley Cyrus, and “Side to Side” by Ariana Grande. And I think that many fans thought that she would represent that era, yet still be the Adela from The Provacateur. Clearly she isn’t at all.

At the end of the day, nobody knows what is going on behind the scenes in Adela’s career. Nobody knows who is making the musical, lyrical, production, promotion, or imagery decisions. But people want to continue the rising star narrative, so they are saying things like “the label is silencing Adela,” or she “is trying too hard to be the perfect student of pop music?” At the end of the day, nobody knows. The reason why they think they know is because of the ways that pop star’s lives are seemingly delivered to you on a silver platter. Social media, TV shows, and podcasts are making artist’s lives so much more visible then they should be. An artist at their debut, should be able to experiment, and change, and mess up with a minimal amount of visibility. But the way that the world has become, everyone needs to be seen from the beginning.