On her debut album ‘Prima,’ Slovak pop hopeful Adéla trades hyperpop chaos for maximalist ambition, with mixed results
Rejection can be the making of an artist, and Adéla has built an entire persona out of the sting. In 2023, the Slovak singer born Adéla Jergová was one of the first contestants cut from Dream Academy, the HYBE and Geffen reality competition that eventually assembled KATSEYE. On Prima, her debut album released September 4 via UMG, she treats that early elimination less like a wound than a starting pistol. The result is a brisk, 11-track half hour of pop that is frequently thrilling, occasionally hollow, and never lacking for nerve.
The through line is hunger. Adéla trained at the Vienna State Ballet and the English National Ballet School before moving to Los Angeles, and the album’s title, which translates to “first,” doubles as a ballet term for the lead dancer. That discipline shows in the sequencing and the sheer velocity of the thing. Where 2025’s EP The Provocateur reveled in frenetic, Grimes-adjacent hyperpop, Prima sands down the chaos into something sleeker and more legible, hard beats wrapped around bright, sticky hooks.
Star Power Over Substance
Executive produced by 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady and hitmaker Blake Slatkin, Prima sounds expensive and alive. The production is the album’s strongest asset, colorful and percussive, engineered to detonate on festival stages like the Lollapalooza and Reading slots Adéla lit up over the summer. When the songs and the sound align, she is magnetic. “Nicole Kidman” is the clearest proof, a bass-heavy, deadpan flex where she delivers lines about designer heels and her own anatomy with unwavering eye contact rather than a wink.
That comic confidence is Adéla’s real signature. On “I’m the Man,” she flips gender scripts with a smirk, and across the record she plays the hedonist and the underdog at once, chasing global pop domination while clinging to the idiosyncrasies of her Eastern European upbringing. She is impressively frank about the transaction, too, openly acknowledging the industry sleaze she indulges in pursuit of fame.
Still, the ambition sometimes outruns the material. Lead single “KGB” opens the album on its weakest foot, its production vibrant but numbing, its hook repetitive enough to read like a KATSEYE reject with extra attitude. The lyrics are the recurring soft spot. When Adéla jabs at the “annoying old white men” who hold the keys to her future, the sentiment lands as valid but unexamined, a rebellion that was, as more than one critic noted, presumably approved by those same gatekeepers before release.
The Cracks That Make Her Human
Prima is at its most interesting when the armor slips. “Therapy,” the penultimate track, is a quiet, almost distorted ballad about the sister she left behind. “When I left home, she was so tiny / Now I come back, and she is my size,” she sings, and the deflation in her voice cuts deeper than any flex. The line lands harder than her complaints about not being able to move her mother closer, precisely because it abandons the pose. Whether the writing fully earns that intimacy is debatable. Some will hear raw confession, others a first draft left unpolished.
The record’s cultural moment is undeniable. 2026 has been a banner year for the prodigious pop blow-up, from Olivia Dean to Slayyyter to Zara Larsson’s inescapable Eurosummer, and “Ain’t In LA,” Adéla’s sun-bleached ode to early Kesha and Bangerz-era Miley, made her a legitimate part of that conversation. She spent the season opening for Demi Lovato and headlining festival tents, and Prima is engineered to convert that momentum into permanence.
It does not entirely succeed. The middle of the album blurs, the lyrics rarely match the production’s imagination, and the whole thing feels more like a collection of vignettes than a cohesive statement. But failing to arrive fully formed is hardly a crime for a debut. What Prima proves is that Adéla already carries herself like a star, and that the gap between the pose and the person is exactly where her most compelling music lives. She has the attitude and the machinery. The songs, given time, may catch up.
