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“I was, like, eight, working the nightshift to learn English”, the 22-year-old singer proclaims in the pre-chorus of “KGB”, the opening track to her debut album. Since the release of Prima, Adéla made a splash, partly thanks to her charismatic pride in her Slovak origins. Yet while she nods to her homeland in her music videos and interviews, her cultural display stops short of singing in Slovak. Instead, she’s compelled to rely on her childhood training to cultivate a mainstream, international fanbase.
Adéla’s lifelong dream is to become a household name. She told Nylon: “I don’t think my country will be proud of me until I’m certified the biggest thing in the world, where it’s just undeniable.” To get there, she swapped the aggressive electronic beats of her hyperpop-adjacent EP The Provocateur for nostalgic trap beats and chopped-and-screwed samples. It worked: two of her songs have reached the global Spotify top 10 and the Billboard Hot 100 top 30, making her one of 2026’s breakout stars.
Still, there is a dissonance between her mission to represent Slovakia and music that sounds so distinctly American. Adéla set herself to revive the bombastic mid-2010s sound of her teen inspirations, such as Miley Cyrus’s Bangerz and Ariana Grande’s Thank U, Next. Her team committed fully to recreating their trap-based sound, even hiring songwriter Theron Thomas, who contributed the famous rap refrain in “We Can’t Stop,” to record a similar refrain for “Ain’t in LA.”
There are distinctly Slovak touches in the opening and closing tracks of the album, such as filming the “Ain’t in LA” video in Bratislava and a song parodying the Soviet secret police (which operated in Slovakia and other Eastern Bloc countries). This cultural display feels slightly tethered however, when compared to the larger portion of Prima that could be seen as generally American: from technical aspects such as the melodies and production, to lyrical references to Western pop culture (Nicole Kidman, Madonna, Louboutins, Nirvana).
This is not to claim that artists are strictly limited to compose autochthonous music from their respective countries, nor a criticism of Adéla for recreating the sounds she grew up loving. It rather highlights the limits of cultural expression in international pop. Artists may use their heritage as an origin story, a visual cue, or a personality quirk in interviews, but not so much that it alienates their core English-speaking audience.
It’s a tough set of parameters to balance, as artists from smaller countries have long had to restrict or showcase a specific part of their heritage. As a Colombian, I know Shakira had to release both English and Spanish albums to transcend the Latin market. Rihanna debuted as a curated “island girl” with Music of the Sun before she was able to move into commercial dance-pop. More recently, Tyla rose to prominence in the early 2020s due to the afrobeats boom in Western Spotify; yet her recent album A*POP sold poorly partly because it was seen as “diluted” amapiano.
Thus, it seems that many international artists must face a trade-off at some point to achieve mainstream success: they must know when it’s convenient to make callbacks to their roots and when to assimilate into familiar American sounds to cater to their commercial backbone audience. It sounds like a binding contract. I don’t mean to criticise Adéla; it’s a near-necessary steppingstone to mass success. I simply hope for more curiosity toward sounds outside the English-speaking canon, so we might one day hear what Adéla listened to when she wasn’t watching Hannah Montana.