Adelgorithm: Adele’s pattern suggests what her next album (after ‘30’) will be called and when it will come out; brace yourselves!

(October 31, 2021).  As we approach the month of Adele, math-minded sleuths may have picked up on a pattern developing with the singer’s age-titled albums—and their release years—to predict what her next album might be called and when she’ll release it.  Djrobblog has developed an Adele algorithm—or Adelgorithm—that analyzes her release history to date, and what it portends for her future.

Adele, born May 5, 1988, has famously titled her albums by the age she was when she first started writing songs for them.  As the songwriting and creation process has obviously grown longer with each release, so too has the gap between her albums’ titles and the age she was at the time of their releases.  

Adele was 19 years and 8 months old when her debut album, 19, was released in January 2008.

Its followup, the blockbuster 21, was issued in January 2011, just four months shy of the British superstar’s 23rd birthday. 

Nearly five years later—at the end of 2015–came 25, by which time Adele was 27 years and six months of age.

Now comes 30, which will be released Nov. 19, while Adele is six months past her 33rd birthday. 

Using the number of months that had transpired since the chanteuse turned the age noted in each album’s title, and with a body of work that’s now sufficient enough to apply any kind of mathematical theory to Adele’s discography, there’s a clearer release pattern emerging.

Adele was eight months beyond her 19th birthday when 19 was released.  She was 20 months beyond her 21st birthday when 21 was released.  At the time of 25’s release, 30 months had transpired since her 25th birthday.  And when 30 is issued in three weeks, 42 months will have passed since the “Easy On Me” singer saw that birthday.

Beginning there, those age deltas of 8 months, then 20, then 30, and finally 42 months illustrate a pattern where each successive, growing gap is separated by first 12 (20 minus 8), then 10 (30 minus 20), then 12 again (42 minus 30).  This means the next gap will be separated from the previous one by 10 again, a number that when added to the current gap of 42, gives us 52 months.

So the next logical gap between Adele’s age at the time of release and the age suggested by her next album’s title would be 52 months, or four years and four months.  This puts the album’s release in September of whichever year it is issued.  

Adele fans will be quick to note that the phenom has never released an album in September—there were two each in January and November of their respective years—so this would mark a departure for her, but the formula works out that way, so indulge it for a moment.  

Now comes the trickier part—calculating what year that will be.

That can be determined by applying a formula to the years of release for each of her first four albums.  Beginning with the album 19, and starting with its release year of 2008, if you add 3 to that you’ll get 2011, the year of its followup.  Adding 3+1 (or four) to 2011 gets you 2015, the year of the third album’s release.  Adding 4+2 (or six) to that year gets you 2021, the release year for 30.  

This means that, using the same additive formula for the next album, you would add 6+3–or nine—to 2021 and get 2030.   In simpler terms, the formula is: Release year (Ry) = Previous album’s release year (or Py) + N + S, where, excluding the first album, N represents the number of years between the current and previous releases and S represents the number of previous releases.

Here is the Adelgorithm in tabular form for ease of illustration:

Using September 2030 as her next album’s release date, and back calculating by the 52 months derived from the previous formula (to get to May 2026, or her 38th birthday), this means Adele’s next album would be called 38, and it wouldn’t come out until she was 42 and four months of age.

This formula is not good news for Adele fans, who would like to think that the gap between releases might become shorter.  Few people can imagine going nearly an entire decade after 30 before her next album drops, or worse, what the Adelgorithm suggests for subsequent releases (as shown in the table above).  And using the blog’s logic and Adele’s history, it would be at least May of 2026 before Adele would even begin the writing process for that next album.

Of course, artists have proven in the past that they can go nine or more years between albums and not miss a beat.  The group Sade (featuring it’s same-named lead singer) famously went ten years between albums in 2000 and 2010, with the latter release, Soldier of Love, outpacing the earlier one, Lover’s Rock, and debuting with more than 500,000 units sold in February 2010.  Sade was 51 at the time.

Also, there’s no reason to doubt that the next albums by contemporary superstars like Beyoncé, Rihanna or Kendrick Lamar, neither of whom have released a solo album in roughly half a decade, will do huge numbers next time around. Each artist is still majorly relevant to their multitude of diehard fans, and their next releases could prove that sometimes absence really does make the heart grow fonder and that this should be no different for an artist like Adele whose music appeals to people of all ages.

More reading: Adele tops the hierarchy of artists who should never release albums in the same week as artists above them on this list.

Of course, all of this is based on an unproven set of theories that is subject to the whims of the artist herself.   Adele, whose albums are often introspective and inspired by the events of her life, could decide to release another one in just two years if the circumstances dictate it, in which case this Adelgorithm would be obliterated.

Or at least, that’s what many of her biggest fans hope is the case.  

Adele fans stay tuned!

DJRob

Ps: Never let an engineer apply a mathematical theory to art!

#Adelgorithm

DJRob (he/him) is a freelance music blogger from somewhere on the East Coast who covers R&B, hip-hop, pop and rock genres – plus lots of music news and current stuff!  You can follow him on Twitter at @djrobblog.

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