Whether you’re someone who has been anxiously anticipating the return of Adele after a six-year break, or if you’re simply aware of her return due to one of the most polished and far-reaching promotional campaigns across magazine covers, TV specials and historic landmarks across the globe, there’s no escaping her now. Adele’s 30 is here.

Though she’s always kept her relationships and child’s life remarkably quiet for a pop star of her renown, it was known she officially divorced her husband and 9-year-old son’s father, earlier this year, concluding their decade-long relationship. And by just hearing 30’s lead single alone, “Easy On Me,” it’s clear she’s using her voice and songwriting abilities as an attempt to explain to her son, and in turn to her millions of fans, of the guilt and uncertainty she felt when choosing to go forward with divorce. “I had no time to choose/ What I chose to do/ So go easy on me,” she belts, her voice gliding effortlessly over the vocal runs.

According to her interview with Oprah Winfrey, which aired on Sunday in tandem with a concert in front of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, the album is her most personal yet. She’s been wrestling with what her younger self, a girl who wished beyond anything else for an engaged father and two-parent household, would think of her deciding to end her marriage, effectively undoing what she vowed to provide for her child.

Though her lyrics have continually exposed the fractures in her heart, “My Little Love,” about her son and not a lover, makes her music personal in a new way. Conversations between the two are woven throughout the verses and choruses

“I feel a bit confused/ I don’t know/ And I feel like I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she sings. He responds “Oh, at all,” sounding like his eyes are wide with childhood wonder and innocence.

At the beginning of the fourth track, “Cry Your Heart Out,” Adele throws her first curveball. She pushes the album’s sound toward one previously untapped in her discography, drifting into the realm of fellow British songstresses Emeli Sandé or even Amy Winehouse. “Oh My God,” with a twitching, electronic intro and “Can I Get It,” with a thumping acoustic guitar, show Adele pushing the boundaries of what we anticipated from her musically.

“All Night Parking” begins as a jazzy piano-led piece (sampled from Erroll Garner and marking Adele’s first credited collaboration), but quickly interpolates a modern, sharply synthesized beat. It’s a pleasant surprise to say the least, and continues to work through the rest of the short track, as she sings of being hard to both digest and impress.

From here, the songs expand back into ballads, with the final two clocking in at nearly seven minutes. “Hold On” begins slow and melancholic, only to build into a belting extravaganza, employing the range of a full orchestra that’s familiar to Adele’s music. She goes low, reaching into her gravely depths of her abdomen (also perfected on 21’s “One and Only”).

With “To Be Loved,” she blows every previous award-winning vocal performance she’s given right from the podium. It’s truly hard to believe she almost lost her voice in the years between 21 and 25 and the successive 25 tour as she sounds so powerful and raw. Starting with her reminiscing on the house she tried to build, she ends with a bit of self-reassurance that she did, indeed, try.

The album concludes with “Love Is A Game,” which, similar to the opener “Strangers By Nature,” sounds almost like the music could be taken from the storybook narration opening to a Golden Age Disney film. About a third of the way into the song, the pace picks up as she sings “What a cruel thing/ To self-inflict that pain/ Love is a game for fools to play.”

Adele took three years to write and compose 30 and there was another three years of waiting on top of that for fans. Despite this, Adele lives up the highest of standards she’s set for herself. If only there were more tracks. Turns out there actually are two more on a deluxe version, though one should question as to how in 2021 Target secured the deluxe version, as well as a remix of “Easy On Me,” with none other than Chris Stapleton. So now it’s time to get our hands on a physical copy.

Follow Domenic Strazzabosco at Twitter.com/domenicstrazz and Instagram.com/domenicstrazz.