“I mean, I’m a funny person,” Adéla says over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles, with a sheepish grin. “Humor is how I deal with shitty things. It gets you through it. It helps me not get too depressed about the heavy stuff. I’m Eastern European and kind of a cunt.” She breaks into a hearty laugh. “That’s my vibe.”
It’s a renegade spirit that courses through Adéla’s debut EP, The Provocateur, released today: not least thanks to the cover, which features the singer lit by a blinding flash in a concrete underpass, hiking up her leather jacket to urinate in what appears to be a cheeky homage to Sophy Rickett’s cult classic ’90s photo series, Women Pissing. And where “Sex on the Beat” offers a wry commentary on the double-edged sword of being a young woman in the spotlight, other tracks show the full breadth of her instincts as a songwriter, charting her journey of creative self-discovery in near-mythic terms: the thunderous fuzz of Nine Inch Nails-esque electric guitars on “Death by Devotion,” co-produced by 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady and rising hitmaker Zhone, and featuring a deliciously silly lyric imploring the listener to “work the horse, no ketamine”; or the unabashed pop of the EP’s closer “Finally Apologizing,” with its Gwen Stefani-esque playground chant of a chorus—“You get what you want from me!”—over electroclash-y buzzsaw synths.
It’s an audacious statement of intent that seems to mark the arrival of a fully formed pop star—and feels even more astonishing once you learn Adéla only launched her solo career less than a year ago. “Sometimes you have to promote music that you’ve been sitting on for a while, but the final mix of the final song was done two weeks ago, so it’s really fresh,” she says, cheerily. “I’m excited to promote it and to see how everybody feels about it.”
You can be sure people will have feelings. If Adéla looks (or indeed, sounds) a little familiar, that’s because her solo career isn’t her first shot at stardom. In 2022, she moved to Los Angeles from her hometown of Bratislava to begin a grueling training program, with the chance to join the global K-pop group Katseye, a process that was documented in a pair of Netflix shows. The first, Dream Academy, was a fan-voted competition in which Adéla was knocked out in the first round; the second, Pop Star Academy, was released after the fact, and documented the contestants’ years-long journey. Across the latter, Adéla swiftly emerged as one of the strongest competitors, regularly earning effusive praise and ranking top of the leaderboard among the judges, as well as serving as something of a maternal figure (despite being a teenager herself) for the younger girls in the group. The show quickly acquired a rabid fanbase, with the online opinions to match: thanks to her powerful talent and self-confidence, Adéla emerged as one of its most-talked-about contestants, outshining even some of those who made the final cut.