The season of Adele Singer talks divorce and new album as she returns to limelight

There has been a rush to define the remaining months of 2021. It will be a winter of discontent, of supply chain disruption and potential blackouts; a postlockdown return to dressing up and going out.

- Laura Snapes

It will also, undoubtedly, be the season of Adele. This week, the biggest-selling female albums artist of the 21st century announced her return, six years after her last album. A new single, Easy on Me , is set for release next Friday. Her fourth album, 30, is rumoured for mid-November.

She heralded her new era with an unprecedented two simultaneous Vogue covers, sitting for separate interviews and photoshoots for the magazine’s US and UK editions.

She talked frankly about her divorce from the charity CEO Simon Konecki, with whom she has a nine-year-old son. She was the one to leave, she told British Vogue. “I didn’t want to end up like a lot of other people I knew. I wasn’t miserable miserable, but I would have been miserable had I not put myself first.” She talked of the anguish the split had caused their son, Angelo, and said she wrote her new album in part to help him understand his parents’ situation.

She also talked of the profound anxiety behind her much-discussed weight loss. “Working out, I would just feel better,” she said. “It was never about losing weight, it was always about becoming strong and giving myself as much time every day without my phone.”