It’s been three years of waiting and I slept through it. This is what the worldwide community of Adele fans has been waiting for, and I missed it without even realizing it: Adele’s first video and single release off of her upcoming album 25 happened without me. Overnight, reviews were written, people (probably) were moved to tears, and, of course, gifs were created.

And yet, despite the frenzy, despite the passionate chaos of fans across the Internet, I remained oblivious, gently nudged awake by sunlight and lazily beginning my morning until I saw (several) messages about the song pop up on my phone. I frantically pulled up the YouTube link, first thing this morning without even getting out of bed, and I was reassured. Adele, England’s resident sultry lady singer with all the feels, is back.

This new video pulled out all the stops with an emotionally profound vengeance. As in the case of her last two albums, 19 and 21, her upcoming 25 promises to make us empathize and emote. But if “Hello,” this latest single, is any indication, it’ll be a different kind of catharsis.

Over the past several years, the entire world has cried for the indignities that Adele has faced in her life. Who has the audacity to break up with this angel who, through her music and her words, has connected to basically everyone with a heart?

In “Hello,” was our angel actually — astonishingly, surprisingly — in the wrong? Was she the one who broke hearts? 2015 Adele pauses to apologize to a figure from her past, to apologize for leaving, apologize for who she is now. In the accompanying music video dropped at midnight last night, she evokes sepia-toned sympathy as she stares the camera down from behind the collar of her fabulous oversized fuzzy coat and belts out the lines, “Hello from the other side / I must’ve called a thousand times / To tell you I’m sorry, for everything that I’ve done.”

Despite being the source of pain now, in her voice we hear the same tinge of heartbreak we heard on 21. Even when she has the power, regret gnaws at her. She broke up with the past and left the small town, but those memories stayed with her. She laments, “I’m sorry, for breaking your heart / but it doesn’t matter, it clearly doesn’t tear you apart anymore.” The entire chorus is belted out, but in the second of silence where her voice quiets on “anymore,” we catch a glimpse of an exhausted, torn apart Adele. This is an Adele who, regardless of having done the heart breaking this time around, still thinks about this person and those moments with hints of nostalgia, as if it was all a series of photographs and conversations from the past blurring together.

The video overlays the present and future, visualizing Adele’s thought process with cuts between intimate scenes with her former lover and the now-empty house which her voice fills. Her words are interrupted by indistinct chatter from the past, echoing faintly throughout the background of the song just as they resound in her memories. It is only in the chorus, where her powerhouse vocals really shine, that the extra noise disappears and she’s forced to come back to earth, to the real world where he’s not picking up the phone anymore and the painful weight of memory sits only with herself.

In one word — a forlorn Hello — we feel her guilt, and a resignation that perhaps she shouldn’t be trying to fix things anymore, that this pain isn’t worth it anymore, that he won’t react anymore. At this point, I almost want her to listen to 19 for a second. Apologizing to the past is simply chasing pavements. Give up, Adele, this part of the past is unfixable.

This futility in rewriting pasts, however, speaks to the continuity of her albums: Adele ages from 19 to 21 to 25 (and is now 27), but she, like anyone, moves on selectively. When she looks back, it’s at her pain, not the knowledge gained — she knew at 19 that she should move on and not linger on a man she loves. But at 25, it’s still her problem.

These ballads to her ghosts have come to define Adele’s albums. It’s fitting, and perhaps ironic, that her album titles mark the passage of time, since so much of her work springs from episodes of the past that don’t fade away. In her debut album, Adele gave us “Chasing Pavements,” a ballad about the confusion inherent in declaring your love, especially when you love people who hurt you. Just a few years ago, she sang to a former lover as well in “Someone Like You” — arguably Adele’s most powerful words — which were consistently able to move her to cry at performances. And now, there’s “Hello,” where the mistrials of loves past are all too familiar to us. Adele, it seems, is haunted. Years pass, but legacies of the past linger.

“Hello” is part of her corpus of ballads, and it succeeds because of the complexity of its themes. Like many Adele songs, she belts repeated verses towards the end of her song. Usually that’s the part that moves broken-hearts in the audience to tears or righteous anger at exes or what have you. Here, however, the pain feels selfish — she even acknowledges that, “it’s so typical for me to talk about myself, I’m sorry.” Her pain today is rooted in guilt. She consoles herself in the song, reminding herself, “at least I can say that I’ve tried to tell you / I’m sorry.” Whether or not she believes she’s actually righting wrongs is a story complicated by the hurt in her eyes and the breaks in her voice.

It’s relatable. We all want to make amends, but instead of getting the audience to empathize with her, “Hello” has me thinking of bad memories that I’ve already forgotten. Adele is conjuring up a past I’ve moved on from and, frankly, don’t want to revisit. I’m forced to confront my mistakes and reflect on the wrongs I’ve done, and while that’s definitely uncomfortable, maybe that’s what she’s getting at. She is no longer singing her hurt, but mending her mistakes. This isn’t therapy; it’s atonement.

In “Someone Like You” she sings about pains that haven’t healed, so she sings to whatever is at the forefront of our anxious minds — for proof of its universality, just check this SNL skit where this song moves people cry over lost job opportunities and pet parakeet squabbles. It’s hilarious, yes, but we understand it because it’s so gripping, because that kind of pain is immediately empathetic — it forces us to cry, commune, and console in shared miseries. But in “Hello,” Adele opts to position herself, for the first time in her career, as the person who hurt us instead.

And it is precisely for this reason that the importance of this song cannot be understated in the biography of Adele. She is no longer the Adele who is wronged and can do no wrong. Here she alludes to pain she’s caused others and how that continues to hurt her. She knows she is hurting herself trying to fix the past, and she merely lays it out for us — bare, raw, and real.

These lyrics are not meant to be sympathetic because “Hello” is not an anthem to the lovelorn. “Hello” is Adele maturing. “Hello” points the finger at no one but her. Adele is right that this is a make-up album, but she’s not just making amends with family, friends, and the nebulous past — she’s making up with herself, too. This is Adele at 25, and it’s an Adele we can’t wait to meet.

Photo courtesy of here.

Alex Zivkovic ('17, Art History/CSRE) has escaped from Orange County and all that this former life entailed. When he's not staring at art, he's probably writing poetry/essays/manifestos about art. Or, ya know, mobilizing his queer agenda and thinking 'bout balkan diasporas inside his palace of books.