And here it is: "Hello," the first new music from Adele in over three years.
The single is a straightforward ballad that sends Adele's voice flying. Following up on her 2011 album 21, an extraordinary tribute to a dead relationship with a still-beating heart, "Hello" examines doomed love. This time, though, Adele is writing from well beyond the relationship instead of from amid the wreckage. Even as she laments the end, "Hello" knows it's just checking in, then moving on.
Adele's vocals carry the weight of the song through its many repetitions, but in truth, the star of the video for "Hello" is its gorgeous direction. Xavier Dolan, a hugely talented young writer and director whose work includes 2012's hypnotic film Laurence Anyways, emphasizes Adele's otherworldly talent with a relatively stark background. The entire video is tinted — or more accurately, faded. It mourns the relationship even as it luxuriates in its death.
Dolan's touch makes "Hello" feel just a little more tender, a little more bruised than a director with less specificity might have had. The best part of the video just may be the opening sequence before Adele even sings. Dolan's camera follows her closely as she tries to fix up an old house, snapping as she whips covers off dusty furniture, then lingering on the aftermath, almost fond.
At one point, you couldn't avoid Adele if you tried — and then she dropped out of the public eye almost completely.
After such a long wait for scraps of any Adele news at all, this new song and video comes to us mere days after she announced on Twitter that her highly anticipated third album will drop on November 20. "I'm sorry it took so long," she wrote, "but you know, life happened."