FEATURE:
Spotlight
PHOTO CREDIT: Patricia Garate
some recent features and interviews with the incredible ADÉLA. Adéla Jergová is a Slovak singer-songwriter and dancer. She took part in Hybe and Geffen Records' 2023 survival show, Dream Academy, a competition to form a global girl group. As a solo artist, she has released some amazing singles. This year, Machine Girl and DeathByDevotion have thrilled critics and fans. Her new E.P., The Provocateur, is out on 22nd August. I am writing this before that date but, by the time this is shared, that E.P. will be out. I think that there will be a call and demand from her fans to release a debut album. I starting out with a 2024 interview from Out. She talked about, among other things, her single, Homewrecked, and her biggest musical influences:
“Earlier this summer, streaming giant Netflix casually released Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE and sent international pop stans from all over the world into a frenzy.
The eight-part docuseries chronicled dozens of teenage girls traveling to LA to begin a training and development program produced by K-Pop record label HYBE to form their first "global girl group." This is how we meet Adéla, a girl from Slovakia whose big dreams outgrew her small town and country. And the dream was just within reach until the production revealed, after over a year of training, that the Top 20 girls would actually be competing against each other for just 6 spots.
Thus began Dream Academy, a global show that concluded last fall and produced the girl group KATSEYE. Though Dream Academy waded into some unethical waters, Pop Star Academy shows the highs and the lows of the participating contestants and what it takes to put together a group that can capture the entire world's attention.
Out: You're releasing your debut song tomorrow. How does it feel?
Adéla: I feel so f--king excited. Ever since the show came out, I've been getting so much attention, and when the show ended and during the last couple of months of the show, I knew that that wasn't the place for me. And I just felt like I needed to find my own path and my own artistry. And that's what I've done ever since the Dream Academy social media part of the show ended. I've been here and I've been working with producers and writers and trying to find a sound that feels like me and that I really can hone in on.
I feel like when you're training for something like a girl group, it's a lot of adapting to each other, feeling each other out, also trying to give a certain fantasy and vision that's put on you because it has to be. After I came out of that, I was like, 'Wait, what the f--k? Who am I?'
But this song, I wrote it with me and [Liam Benayon] and produced it with Dylan Harrison and Riley Aki, and it just feels exactly like me. The story is super personal and I'm so excited. It's so campy and weird and dramatic and way too much. And honestly, that's a lot of what I've always been told. Even down to my face. They used to tell me, you have a Jim Carrey face. And I was like, wait, work? Yeah, I do. But now I get to do that, and it feels really fun, and the people haven't responding to it really well, and I just really appreciate it. So I was super excited. This is the first one, and it's only going to get better and bigger.
Can you tell me about the lyrics of "Homewrecked." Is it about your experience on the show? A man?
I kind of like people not really knowing. If you put whatever meaning you want to it, I leave it up to you. Just know that it is rooted in real experience, and whether you take it literally or you go the more abstract route, I kind of enjoy seeing everybody's take on it.
When I wrote it though, in my head, it was about infidelity and it was about dealing with the worst feelings that you have of somebody close hurting you in such a way. And it's basically about killing the mistress that they cheated on somebody with. So it's about killing the person that they hurt you with. And it's not in the sense of let's put all the blame on the girl, but it's about, I want to hurt you so bad that this person that makes you happy, I want to kill them because you hurt me. Which didn't that happen in real life? And if it did, I wouldn't be telling you.
Who are your biggest musical influences? Who do you grew up listening to?
I am the biggest Beyoncé stan there is. I'm the biggest BeyHive you've ever f--king met. I've watched Homecoming, no joke, 17 times. I've watched it so much. And I made everybody in my closest circle watch it too. And I actually dragged Emily and Megan to the Renaissance world tour and to the movies too. I was like, if we want to do this. Let's f--king learn from the best. Yes, the tickets are expensive as f--k. We're going. We have a shoot tomorrow. I don't care. We're going.
Lady Gaga is a huge inspiration. I think seeing her artistry and seeing how absolutely unhinged she's been in her career. But how it's so intentional though, to me, that's so interesting and beautiful. And seeing all the different parts of her. You have the Fame monster, and they have Joanne, and then it's like, now we're in her jazz era with Tony Bennett. What an artist. And I think that's a huge inspiration. I obviously love Chappell Roan. I think she's so amazing. I think she's doing something that hasn't been done before, and it's just so fresh and amazing to see vocally. I grew up listening to Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston. And Mariah and Ariana. I was the biggest Ariana Grande stan. The pop girl is Britney. I really grew up just immersed in pop through and through, and I used to get ridiculed a lot growing up. People love to make fun of pop. It's like, girl, pop stands for popular, and it's popular for a reason. Oh, also Troye Sivan and Charlie xcx.
As someone who quite literally studies this industry and what it does to pop stars, just keep uplifting each other up because people will try and try to tear y'all down. This is all just entertainment and fake for them.
And everybody has been. KATSEYE members, non-KATSEYE members, everybody. We've all been very just drilling it in, like, are you okay? Are you good? I'm seeing what's being said. It's so actually loving, and it's actually what was so surprising about, honestly, the whole experience is the entire time, the whole class of the girls, or the cast of the show, it was just such an example of what people paint out girls to be. You would think that it would be so catty and mean, but there was none of that. Seriously none. Our project managers, they would say, 'F--k, we were so scared. But honestly, we got so lucky with all of you.' There was so much maturity and love with everything. The way that we handled each other. Everybody was so aware that it's such a tough thing to go through. We're all in such a weird position, and nobody intentionally tried to hurt anybody. And if there were issues, we talked them out, whether they showed it on camera or not, there's so many conversations honestly, that we also chose to have off camera. We we're real people, and you're seeing real things, but some things you don't want to show. You know what I mean? So it was definitely interesting. But I think for me and for all of us, where it was very authentic and it showed us actually going through what we were going through, and we're all just glad that we have each other and that we know what happened and that we're all good. Everybody wishes everybody the best. Seriously. That's how we feel”.
In this interview with The Line of Best Fit, ADÉLA talked about being raised in a conservative household and her early obsession with American Pop music and culture. The Slovakian artist has her own blueprint for Pop. Now residing in Los Angeles, this is someone who is primed for long-term success and endurance:
“Jergová was quite the determined pre-teen. Raised on the homogenised Internet, she had a "deep, guttural knowing" that she could attain fame — she saw bloggers like Bethany Mota go from a regular girl to a superstar influencer, along with countless others liker her gaining a following by sharing their talent. Performing "was the only thing that I ever wanted to do," she tells me, and the rigorous demands of becoming a professional ballerina — eight hours of practice, followed by more after hours — gave her a hardened sense of discipline, as well as a competitive, sly mindset. "I got off on the fact that I was working when everybody else was sleeping," she says.
"I was so narrow-mindedly, like, how do I get from Point A to Point fucking Z?" she asked herself. It’s not easy to go from a child in a small, foreign country to one of the most exciting Gen-Z pop stars of the moment — or even have the guts to think about such a feat in the first place. "In a childlike, stupid way," Jergová says with a smile, "and it really worked for me."
Her approach — working very very hard — has resulted in some spectacular results. Her latest single, February’s "MACHINE GIRL", is a succinct and sharp send-up to entertainment television where reality is distorted, people are treated like pawns, and extremity triumphs over nuance. "Why you comin’ at me, baby? Yell at the machine, girl!" she taunts. The video, choreographed by Jergová and Miguel Zárate, is angular and violent; a line of six women battle each other while playing to the camera, swinging at heads and threatening ankles. Grimes, who co-produced the track after DMing Jergová out of the blue, cameos at the end to advise the catfighters to turn up the rage.
It’s a not-so-subtle jab at her time in Pop Star Academy, the Netflix competition show where contestants audition to join the meticulously-created global girl group that would become KATSEYE. Jergová was one of the first to be eliminated and is not shy about the fact that it hit her hard: "It was the worst year of my life," she says, calling it "identity-stripping."
Most girls went home after being kicked off, to reprogram or destress, but it wasn’t an option for her: "I just knew that if I went home in that moment and I wallowed in that rejection and sadness that comes with such a life altering thing, I would not be back."
A trip back to Slovakia would mean starting over, back to a childlike blankness, which didn’t fit with the curated life plan she set out for herself. "Do you think I'm gonna go to college after I spent two years doing this every single day?" she asks. "For years, doing singing and dance lessons? I didn't have a childhood, and you want me to go to college? What are you talking about?"
Jergová knew she had to stay in LA and undergo the artist’s rite of passage — to find "a really shitty apartment and move out here and figure it out." After a quick trip home to renew her visa, it was a year of exploration and trial and error — before she arrived at her now-cemented electronic, explosive pop, she went through an indie rock phase she knew didn’t suit her ("The only music that I've ever listened to is pop music. Like, what am I doing?" she says). On her vision board are the typical influences of Britney, Madonna, Lady Gaga, as well as more esoteric picks like Imogen Heap and M.I.A. Her songs are brash, cutting, unafraid to show Jergová's vision for ADÉLA first and foremost.
"My whole ethos as a human is that I'm extremely imperfect, and so is everybody else, and I find that so beautiful," she says. "I find both sides of me interesting. Obviously, my first song was about me wanting to kill my dad's mistress. I mean, probably not the right emotion to have. But it's real! You would be mad too!" She’s talking about “HOMEWRECKED”, her revenge hit-and-run fantasy that unfurls with a "rotten, ugly rage inside of me." After she makes her mark, she flees to America. "I'm not very interested in keeping it very PC or down the middle of the line, nice girl, because I don't think I'm that at all. If you've seen the show, and if you've watched any of my content or consumed any of my music, I think one can tell I'm just interested in expressing myself to the fullest."
Not having full control of her vision would be incompatible with how Jergová operates. Maybe getting eliminated from Pop Star Academy was a blessing in disguise — now she has the full opportunity to progress independently. "If there’s six people in a group, you can’t let everyone have creative freedom, it’s never gonna work. That’s what K-pop is. But now being a solo artist at an American label, I get to completely be myself." Do you think she’d come all this way just to acquiesce to someone else’s ideas? In fact, when she auditioned, being in a group was never really a part of her plan. The executives on the show agreed, saying she’d work more as a solo artist, which she learned retroactively. "That would have been nice to hear," she says.
Her music videos are filled with comments from fans relieved she went solo, but she’s been receiving somewhat misguided pushback, too. I bring up her post I saw a while ago, with a pouty Jergová sitting atop a Capitol Records contract. "I sold out fr," she says in the caption. In our conversation, she has no qualms about reaping the benefits of a team behind you – "Being a pop artist is hard. You need budget, time, effort, people to be passionate about it" – but some may see a label backing not as a career boost but as autonomy regression.
Jergová’s plan is assertive and bold, uncompromising and commanding (when people hear it, she hopes that they’ll have a thought – whether it’s admiration or irritation). Two songs that complete her upcoming EP are gritty, sublime, perfect for the club’s flashing lights, like if Tate McRae fused with Charli xcx with the help of Grimes. There was a lot of "speed dating," Jergová says, to make the perfect team, which is now made up of Alex Chapman, Leland, Dylan Brady, Blake Slatkin, among others. It’s a conceptual project that centers an exaggerated version of ADÉLA — sort of a character anyway — growing up, moving to Los Angeles, making it as a pop star. There’s some truth to the mistress-killing — or at least, she certainly felt the visceral rage at the time. "I saw this Greta Thunberg quote the other day, where she says, 'I think we need more angry women.' I agree. I am quite the young angry woman”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jason Omar Al-Taan
I am finishing off with an interview from NME around the release of The Provocateur. That title very much describes her role in Pop. Someone pushing boundaries and staking her claim as a future legend. For anyone who has not heard her music, do go and check out the stunning ADÉLA:
“Dropping on August 22, her debut EP ‘The Provocateur’ has plenty of depth. As it pivots from MARINA-esque electro (‘Homewrecked’) to Britney-style robopop (‘Superscar’) and industrial club thumpers, ADÉLA documents the thrills and pitfalls of navigating the music industry as a self-aware and very ambitious young woman. “Maybe I should count myself so lucky, so lucky,” she sings on ‘Superscar’. “All these dirty hands, they wanna touch me, so touch me.”
The project is smart, sharp and savagely catchy, but “not musically very cohesive” in ADÉLA’s eyes – something she’s perfectly happy with. “It’s got the first song I ever made and the last song, which was finished literally last week,” she says. “So to me, it’s meta in a way, because it’s this snapshot of, like, ‘How does this girl feel about what she’s trying to achieve, and how is she finding all the things she has to do to get there?'”
One such thing is dealing with the way “the public is suddenly perceiving her”, which she believes is “so different from who I am as a person, really”. But ultimately, she “doesn’t give a fuck” about it all. On the hyperpop stomper ‘Machine Girl’, which was co-produced by Grimes, ADÉLA sings about being a “pinned up poster of pop perfection” who’s “d-d-drippin’ in drama”, but also tells us: “Past her lips, you will find her brain.” She’s committing to the role of high-maintenance pop starlet with a knowing wink.
When she moved to Los Angeles three years ago to pursue a music career, she felt immediately at home. “Whereas in Slovakia,” she adds, “I stick out like a sore thumb.” Did she try to soften her natural bluntness? After all, LA’s entertainment enclaves practically run on tactful euphemisms. “No, I refuse!” ADÉLA replies gleefully. “I think it’s kind of funny, and people actually like it because they’re just not used to it.”
In 2023, she landed a place on The Debut: Dream Academy, a YouTube reality series that created the K-pop-inspired girl group KATSEYE. ADÉLA was the first of 20 hopefuls to be eliminated, but again, she was undeterred. When it was followed a year later by the Netflix docuseries Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE, she was ready with an attention-grabbing debut single. “I’ll catch you with that dirty little whore,” she sings on ‘Homewrecked’, chastising her father for his extramarital affair.
“I was very logical about it,” she says. “Because no matter if I was a background character or more prominent, I knew I’d have the most eyes on me ever. But I ended up being quite the provocateur on the show.” ADÉLA isn’t exaggerating: after the series premiered, the first comment she read was from a troll calling her an “ugly, stupid ass bitch”.
ADÉLA wrestles with her post-reality show reputation across the EP: her way of telling trolls that “I’m not gonna be submissive just to win over public perception, because that’s not reality, it’s bullshit”. Besides, bullshit would get in the way of her purpose as a pop star. “I’m here to make people more comfortable with being uncomfortable,” ADÉLA says. “Being human – truly human – in pop music, I like to talk about my imperfections. To me, the negative sides of myself are just as interesting as the positive sides”
One of the most promising and talented artists coming through right now, there is going to be a lot of new fans discovering the music of ADÉLA. A new E.P. is due and there will be a string of live dates. She plays London’s Basing House on 19th September. There will be global dates and some huge moments ahead. For anyone new to the magic of this amazing artist, do go and make sure that you…
CHECK her out.
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