Every Adele Song, Ranked

After five years away, some might have expected that Adele would return with something broad, splashy, anthemic. But instead, she aimed right for the heart, with just her voice, over the piano of collaborator Greg Kurstin. Adele confesses, “There ain’t no gold in this river/That I’ve been washing my hands in forever.” “Easy on Me” was her first taste of 30, a simple ballad of adult regret and guilt, the one song on the album she says she wrote specifically about her divorce. No special effects, no gimmicks — just that voice, whisking the first syllable of “easy” on a journey around the world. A confident move for her first single in five years, but Adele was vindicated when “Easy on Me” instantly became a record-setting comeback hit. Plus a country version with Chris Stapleton, the go-to guy of 2021 for breakup duets. —R.S.

“She wasn’t looking for an acoustic track,” producer and co-writer Fraser T. Smith told RS in 2012 about this 21 flamethrower. “She wanted something quite driven.” No kidding. One of Adele’s most cathartic songs — just listen to the way her voice vaults from pensive in the verses to unleashed in the choruses, especially in the phrase “watched it pour” — “Set Fire to the Rain” started simply, with piano, drums, and Adele singing melody lines. Musically, Smith envisioned meshing Adele’s lung power with what he called “Ennio Morricone strings, spaghetti-western style.” When it came to the lyrics, we can thank a breakup and Adele’s cigarette breaks outside the studio. During one, Smith recalled, “She had finished with her boyfriend and was trying to light a cigarette in the rain, and her lighter wouldn’t work. At that point, she was at her lowest and thought, ‘All I want to do is put this behind me — if I had a fire, I would set fire to the rain.’” As with several other tracks on 21, Adele wound up ditching producer Rick Rubin’s version for the rawer early take with Smith. —D.B.

As Adele says, each song with producer Inflo began with a “six-hour therapy session.” “Hold On” is the kind of song where it feels like the therapy session never ended. It begins in hushed secrecy, with Adele opening up about her deepest doubts and fears. “Right now, I truly hate being me,” she admits. “Every day, feels like the road I’m on/Might just open up and swallow me whole.” But the music lifts her up; halfway through, the drums kick in as the the song builds into a full-band R&B extravaganza. According to the credits, the backup choir is “Adele’s crazy friends,” who keep telling her to hold on. —R.S.

Adele wraps her voice around a slippery guitar in “Send My Love (To Your New Lover),” which starts out impressively minimal — an intricate blend of finger-picking and muted thumps — before reaching an arena-ready roar. The singer takes aim at another old flame, sketching the chasm between his words and actions in a few cutting lines. She lands one fierce jab (“Send my love to your new lover/Treat her better”), but this time, she’s more interested in heading to the high road. “I’m giving you up,” she notes. “I’ve forgiven it all/You set me free.” —E.L.

Adele is known as pop’s heartbreak queen, but that leaves her love songs sorely underrated. And her best love song? Well, it’s the first song she ever wrote, the tribute to where she grew up. She wrote the track at age 16 in just 10 minutes. It was her response to her mom’s request that she move from West Norwood to attend university. The result is a stirring piano ballad that triumphantly celebrates the various wonders of the place that helped mold her into the young woman she is. Eventually, “Hometown Glory” would be the song to kick off everything for Adele: It was released in 2007 as her debut single. It didn’t take off straight away, instead getting a major boost after it was featured in various popular TV shows a year later, like Skins, One Tree Hill, and Grey’s Anatomy. —B.S.

The young wisdom of Adele has always been something she just got, this ability to craft the complexity of emotion into these timeless ballads it’s hard to believe hadn’t already been written, as though they had been waiting for her all along. “When We Were Young” may be the most wrecking of her parlays into this notion, not because it recounts any particular instance of heartbreak but because in under five minutes, she spins the existential crisis-inducing topics of time and aging into what feels like a snapshot of our own past, present, and future. “Let me photograph you in this light/In case it is the last time that we might/Be exactly like we were before we realized/We were sad of getting old, it made us restless,” Adele offers on a ravaging chorus coming from the queen of marking each passing album and era with an age — unable to escape to confines of time. It’s as much about all of the people we have and will ever love and the ones we’ll never have a chance to as it is about the ever-changing versions of ourselves and how we’re forever changed by each other. —L.P.

There are a handful of songs in music history where an emotional response can be elicited by just the first few notes. Adele’s 2011 single “Someone Like You” is one of them. The simple piano ballad was co-written with Semisonic’s Dan Wilson and is one of the biggest heartbreakers in pop history, a gorgeous combination of Adele’s effective lyricism and even more persuasive voice. On the single, she mourns the end of a relationship, not quite yet having come to terms with the loss of someone she loved so much. She goes on the defensive: showing up and claiming, in spite of herself, that they are replaceable. It is one of the best breakup songs of all time, and its emotionality was most perfectly captured in a Saturday Night Live sketch where each character immediately sobs upon hearing the song’s opening piano strains. —B.S.