Adele Laurie Blue Adkins MBE (born 5 May 1988), known mononymously as Adele, is an English singer-songwriter. She is known for her powerful mezzo-soprano vocals and songwriting. After graduating in arts from the BRIT School in 2006, Adele signed a record deal with XL Recordings. Her debut album, 19, was released in 2008 and spawned the UK top-five singles “Chasing Pavements” and “Make You Feel My Love”. 19 has sold over 2.5 million copies in the UK and was named in the top 20 best-selling debut albums of all time in the UK. Adele was honored with the Grammy Award for Best New Artist.

Adele released her second studio album, 21, in 2011. It became the world’s best-selling album of the 21st century, with sales of over 31 million. 21 is the top-performing album in the US chart history, topping the Billboard 200 for 24 weeks with singles “Rolling in the Deep”, “Someone Like You”, and “Set Fire to the Rain” topping the charts worldwide to become her signature songs. The album received a record-tying six Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year. In 2012, Adele released “Skyfall”, a soundtrack single for the James Bond film Skyfall, which won her the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Her third studio album, 25, was released in 2015 to breaking first-week sales records in the UK and US, where in the US, it is the only album to sell over three million copies in a week. 25 earned her five Grammy Awards, including the Album of the Year. The lead single, “Hello”, became hugely successful worldwide. Her fourth studio album 30 released in 2021 contains the chart-topping and Grammy winning single “Easy on Me”. 25 and 30 became the year’s best-selling albums worldwide including the US and the UK in 2015 and 2021 respectively. All of her studio albums except 19 topped the yearly best selling albums chart worldwide more than any artist in the 21 century as of 2023.

Adele is one of the world’s best-selling music artists, with sales of over 120 million records worldwide. She was named as the best-selling artist of the 2010s decade in the US and worldwide as well as best-selling female artist of the 21st century in the UK. Her accolades include sixteen Grammy Awards (including two Album of the Year wins), twelve Brit Awards (including three British Album of the Year wins), an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award and a Primetime Emmy Award. 21 and 25 are certified Diamond in the US, most of any artist who debuted in the 21 century.

Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was born on 5 May 1988 in the Tottenham district of London, to an English mother, Penny Adkins, and a Welsh father, Marc Evans. After Evans left when Adele was 2, she was brought up by her mother. She began singing at age 4 and asserts that she became obsessed with voices. In 1997, 9-year-old Adele and her mother, who by then had found work as a furniture maker and an adult-learning activities organiser, relocated to Brighton on the south coast of England. 

In 1999, she and her mother moved back to London; first to Brixton, then to the neighboring district of West Norwood in south London, which is the subject of her first song “Hometown Glory”. Adele spent much of her youth in Brockwell Park where she would play the guitar and sing to friends, which she recalled in her 2015 song “Million Years Ago”. She stated, “It has quite monumental moments of my life that I’ve spent there, and I drove past it [in 2015] and I just literally burst into tears. I really missed it.” Adele graduated from the BRIT School for Performing Arts & Technology in Croydon in May 2006,  where she was a classmate of Leona Lewis and Jessie J. Adele credits the school with nurturing her talent  even though, at the time, she was more interested in going into artists and repertoire (A&R) and hoped to launch other people’s careers.

Four months after graduation, Adele published two songs on the fourth issue of the online arts publication PlatformsMagazine.com. She had recorded a three-song demo for a class project and given it to a friend. The friend posted the demo on Myspace, where it became very successful and led to a phone call from Richard Russell, director of the music label XL Recordings. She doubted if the offer was real because the only record company she knew was Virgin Records, and she took a friend with her to the meeting. Around this time, Adele collaborated with Ricsta on “Be Divine”, a song described as an “electronic club-ready” track.

Nick Huggett, at XL, recommended Adele to manager Jonathan Dickins at September Management, and in June 2006, Dickins became her official representative. September was managing Jamie T at the time and this proved a major draw for Adele, a big fan of the British singer-songwriter. Huggett then signed Adele to XL in September 2006. Adele provided vocals for Jack Peñate’s song, “My Yvonne,” for his debut album, and it was during this session she first met producer Jim Abbiss, who would go on to produce both the majority of her debut album, 19, and tracks on 21. In June 2007, Adele made her television debut, performing “Daydreamer” on the BBC’s Later… with Jools Holland. Adele’s breakthrough song, “Hometown Glory”, written when she was 16, was released in October 2007.