A recent ID cover feature called ‘When We Were Young’, the second track unveiled from Adele’s upcoming ‘25’ album, a “shimmery disco ballad”.
...‘When We Were Young’ sounds exactly like that song Adele usually does. It’s a good song! There’s a tremulous piano intro, some fragile guitar and that voice which acts as a reminder – if you needed it – of what sets her apart from all those X Factor hopefuls (the bit where she laughs through a pre-chorus is pure class).
But we’ve already had the album’s first single, ‘Hello’. Did we really need another that sticks so stringently to Adele’s formula? Ok, at the end there’s what you might, at a stretch, call ‘soulful backing vocals’ but that scarcely makes ‘When We Were Young’ the breath of fresh air it was billed as. At the end of the video (filmed live at London’s The Church studio) she says: “I’ve never done this before!” The trouble is – she has.
I knew she was gonna get dragged for releasing ballad after ballad, I love both songs and it's clearly her style of music and her sound but they have a point that the song sounds like everything she has done before.
They didn't lie. The first thing I thought of when I heard the song was that the comments I heard before said it was supposed to be different. It wasn't.
Obviously no one in their right mind expects her to serve bops, but it's a bit samey
