21

Named as the Greatest Billboard Top 200 Album of All Time, 21 is the second studio album from the multiple BRIT, GRAMMY, Oscar and Golden Globe award-winning, ADELE. On 21, she constantly moves between phases of a relationship, between dimensions of grief. “Only yesterday was the time of our lives,” she breathes in “Someone Like You,” a song about reaching out to an ex years after the end of their relationship and finding that he’s now married and content without her. “I lose myself in time just thinking of your face,” she sighs on “One and Only,” what she called the first happy track she wrote for the record. Her portraits of despair also involve surging between the past and present. “When was the last time you thought of me, or have you completely erased me from memory?” she demands on “Don’t You Remember.” Throughout the song, she struggles to cast herself as someone worthy of recollection, the last remaining way she can become a permanent fixture of her ex’s mind and life. Love is hitched to precarity in Adele’s world, always needing to be stated or defended or mourned. — Pitchfork