It’s all about the River Lea. Anyone wanting 25 to pack as much of a punch as 21 did – or, for that matter, 19, Adele’s debut – should skip past the wobbly-lower-lipped piano ballads and the one kiss-off, and head straight to River Lea, track seven of this most anticipated of post-hit comebacks. Nestled among all the oaky, wistful songs in which Adele is elegantly conflicted about the past, is a gospel-tinged ode to a canalised east London rivulet. The River Lea is a Thames tributary full of stolen mopeds; a niche environmental group called Love The Lea try to stop it being poisoned by run-off from the road where Mark Duggan got shot.
When push comes to shove, the mark of emotionally effective pop music is not melisma, or string sections, but finding the universals in specifics, in granular detail. It’s in Amy Winehouse’s “lickle carpet burns”, in the “famous blue raincoat” that was “torn at the shoulder” (Leonard Cohen), it’s in Adele turning up out of the blue, uninvited, and it’s here too. Much roots music is written about rivers; here, Adele’s heart is the humble Lea Navigation – “a valley”, “so shallow, and manmade”, she sings.
Here, the woman who sold 31m copies of one album in a bear market is racked by self-doubt, frightened of being unmasked as a fake – that most x-chromosomal of afflictions; later she’s even apologising in advance to a lover for some as-yet-uncommitted sin. She can’t go back, Adele notes in a measured husk that swings on the chorus, but she can feel the reeds growing out of her fingers. You’ll want to press repeat on this nicely-coiffed international superstar’s dingiest London song since Chasing Pavements, one that shines, like petrol on stagnant water.
The rest? The bulk of 25 is more mindful of using the correct knife and fork, with piano chords dialled up and crunchy specifics dialled down. It is startling every now and again – returnee producer Paul Epworth going all Florence Welch with the drums on I Miss You, say – but overall, conservative compared to what Adele could get away with.
Pop magi Max Martin and Shellback provide a sassy diversion from all the heartache with Send My Love (To Your New Lover): it’s no Rolling in the Deep, but it’s a hoot. There are two odes to Adele’s men. Remedy, a big, overly blowsy Ryan Tedder co-write, is, roughly, The One About Angelo, her son, and the 80s-ish Water Under the Bridge, a Greg Kurstin co-write, is, roughly, The One About Simon, her partner.
“We both know we ain’t kids no more,” Adele sings, pointing up another key theme: the passage of time. The author of 25 is now 27, and reflecting on a youth that seems a Million Years Ago (recalls Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina). Nostalgia featured on 21; even at 19, Adele could access the bittersweetness of an older artist. But even as she fulfils the brief here – not disappointing, revealing how fame heals some things, but not others – you want to wrench the woman away from the ivories and order her a jug of margarita.