25
Adele

This is quite unexpected, but I was tempted to skip so, so many times. Just when I was getting really sick of the awful 2015 production on some of these tracks, they wisely decided to strip back the instrumentation for the last few tracks. Doesn't help much though. When "All I Ask" comes around, she sings "what if I never love again?", and I just want to shake her. Girl, have some self-awareness. Clearly, you have and you will love again. Apparently it's all you do. Calling this album 'mature' is laughable. I'm in my thirties now, and maybe I just can't handle this level of mid-twenties self-seriousness. Her stuff on 21 was better, across the board. "When We Were Young" is just about the only song that actually resonated with me, I think especially because it's such a funny thing to say in your mid-twenties but it feels vulnerable and genuine, and it has a profound tenderness for its subject that suggests more than what it says, and that has a sense of melancholy that isnt entirely focused on her own inability to let go, or at least, understands that things are inevitably going to change.

3