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If you’re in a public place and about to hit play on Adéla’s video for “Sex on the Beat,” consider turning down the volume first. The visual begins with the 21-year-old Slovak pop star—her hair dyed pastel pink, her eyebrows bleached—appearing to simulate an orgasm in front of a shrine to pop music in her bedroom. (Written out in hot pink masking tape? “Sex = pop.”) She then tunes into a YouTube masterclass led by Christina Aguilera—“Harness your sexuality and become pop royalty in eight weeks!” Aguilera croons—before launching into an eye-popping dance routine, choreographed by Doechii collaborator Robbie Blue, that sees her undertake the raunchiest aerobics routine you’ve ever seen, partly executed atop a man dressed as an office worker with an eyepatch. Underpinning it all, though, is Adéla’s winking humor: a meta commentary on the “sex sells” mantra that has defined pop stardom over the decades, the video takes that idea and runs with it to its most brazen—and ultimately subversive—extreme. You can’t help but crack a smile.
“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.
“For me, being a provocateur is just speaking your truth,” she says when I ask her about the EP’s title. “A lot of the time, people don’t really want to hear it. Even as a kid in Slovakia, I’ve always had a different point of view to everyone else, and I was very vocal and outspoken about it. And on the show, I was painted in this kind of super blunt, confrontational way, and there were so many different reactions [to me] that were completely polar opposites of each other. People either really love me or they really hate me—and now, I’ve come to enjoy that. I’d much rather be that than straight down the middle, inoffensive. If you don’t like what I’m doing, great. Why, I wonder? And if you do: again, why? I think that’s what I value in artists, is them being true to themselves.”
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Watching the show back, however, it’s easy to see that Adéla was always destined to be a solo artist. (It’s something many of the judges on the show observed as they grappled with their decision to let go one of the brightest stars in the competition.) “Actually, at the time I felt that way too,” says Adéla, after a pause. “It was something that I had to honestly come to terms with even before I got off the show, because I already felt it—I felt it within myself, primarily. I was having conversations with the teachers and my family and just seeing what the project was panning out to be, and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m really not meant for this.’ There was a disconnect.”
Indeed, the day after she finished filming, she remembers calling her parents, who promptly asked her what her plans were. Would she be returning home to Slovakia? Absolutely not. “My parents were like, ‘It’s okay, you can go to college!’ And I was like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? Go to college?’” She laughs again. “I was like, ‘Girl, I just slaved away for two years. What do you mean go to college?’”
Instead of taking time out to lick her wounds, Adéla seized every opportunity she could find. Knowing that the show would be premiering about a year after she finished filming, she quickly set about throwing herself into songwriting sessions, making an unexpected pivot into indie rock music. “I actually went home for two months last April, and I was looking at my childhood bedroom wall, and all it had was Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande and Beyoncé and Rihanna and Madonna and Britney. And I was like, ‘Why the fuck am I making rock music?’ I’m such an unabashedly huge fan of pop music. And I just wrote out this manifesto, literally, a Google Doc of what I liked, and why it resonated with me, and went from there.” (There were also some Pinterest boards, which she recently looked back at. She deadpans: “I was like, ‘That’s gross.’”)
Upon returning to LA, Adéla wrote her first single, “Homewrecked”—a pulsing Euro pop banger that harkens back to early Lady Gaga—and with the premiere of Pop Star Academy imminent, she decided to ride the wave of public interest and release it independently. But it was her second self-released single, “Superscar,” that marked her arrival as a budding pop auteur: a fast and furious anthem dissecting the various ways in which the music industry pushes young performers to their limits—“Shut my lips to speak, stick to your strategy,” she purrs on the bridge. “I know you like ’em weak, sold you a piece of me”—accompanied by a video in which her wild skills as a dancer are on full display.
It is pretty staggering, I note, that she was making—and funding—all of this entirely herself. “It was hard,” she says. “I was also in college full time at that point, and I was doing it all. I was rhinestoning gloves with my friend Emily till 3 a.m. the night before the shoot, and I was obviously producing and writing the music and posting it on streaming platforms and TikTok, and I had college assignments due the next day. And then manically dyeing my hair pink at the same time. But I think it taught me a lot about myself and my vision and honestly made it easier to then transition into the label system.” In May of this year, Adéla signed with Capitol Records, making the EP her first release on a major label. “I knew my vision couldn’t be swayed by label people, because I had worked so hard at it and it was so clear. And I’d done it all on my own up to that point—I think it was easier for people to respect me because of that.”
An early fan (and now close collaborator) is stylist Chris Horan, who most famously helped build the Charli XCX Brat-osphere, but has also worked with a who’s who of offbeat It girls from Hari Nef to Barbie Ferreira. “I watched the Netflix show and immediately was like, ‘This girl is such a star,’” Horan remembers. “I followed her on Instagram, and she followed me back a few days after and messaged me. We just professed our love for each other.” One element in particular Horan was keen to hone in on was references to Adéla’s roots, with plenty of Eastern European films—and shots of the famous “Slavic Doll” models of the 2000s—on the moodboard. Yet, “she is so clear in her vision of what she is creating,” Horan adds. “It’s really about to just meeting her where she already is with the music.”
“The one thing that I really appreciate about Chris is that he keeps the story at the forefront—it’s not about doing something because it’s cool, it’s about doing it because it has meaning and aids what we’re trying to say,” Adéla says of the cultural references she felt increasingly emboldened to weave into her visuals thanks to Horan. “I really appreciated that, because obviously, I am an immigrant in America, and I always felt like my Slovak-ness was something that made me lesser as a kid. That’s why I have an American accent, because I made myself learn perfect English. To have somebody I trust so much, and whose opinion I value so much, be like, ‘No, I really think we should honor this’ felt really beautiful.”
Though she’s also quick to note that, despite being from a country that sat for many decades behind the Iron Curtain and even today is better known for its castles and folk art than its pop stars, she never let that curtail her ambitions. “I’m from a tiny country, and Slovakia hasn t had a global performer or superstar ever, so when I told my family I wanted to be a pop singer, they were like, ‘Are you going to do it on a smaller scale?’ But I never wanted that. It was just really hard for them to even grasp how that would be possible. But hey,” she says, breaking into a smile: “We’re doing it.”
“Doing it” she certainly is. Speaking to Adéla in the weeks leading up to the release, she’s been busy putting the finishing touches to the EP and tweaking the “Sex on the Beat” video—although she did allow herself a well-earned weekend off to attend Lollapalooza in Chicago, to hang out with her friend the musician and rapper 2hollis, and support Katseye during their barnstorming main stage performance. (She remains close friends with all the Katseye girls: “I knew it was a big moment for them, and I wanted to be there for that.”)
So when will it be her turn to take the stage? “I want to do live shows, I don’t care what capacity,” she says. “I don’t know how the EP is going to do, but I don’t care. I just want to be in the clubs performing. I want to be Gaga in 2006, performing in the Ikea parking lot. That’s my vibe. And if one day I get to do it on a bigger scale… that’s sick.”
