Free sales-boosting idea: a reverse I’m in Your City Trick, with one new single for all the cities Adéla ain’t in…
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Claire Davidson: Adéla’s career is still in its infancy, meaning that most of her industry narrative is still tied up in her being, to put it crudely, a Katseye reject. Capitol was smart to push “Ain’t in LA” as a single: not only is the song a direct refutation of prescribed paths to stardom for young, aspiring female performers (“the baddest bitches ain’t in LA”), but it doubles as a valentine to the savvy listeners who, like Adéla herself, have a genuine love for the craftsmanship that goes into making pop music. Said another way, this song is fan service: the entire second verse is dedicated to “all the girls in them unknown cities” who yearn for fame while knowing that they likely won’t be privileged enough to get it. Still, it’s very sweet fan service, delivered by Adéla’s earnestly whooshing soprano, which allows her to effortlessly glide across the hook with wistful optimism. The sonics could support that sincerity more: the cavernous sub-bass and clanking snares make the song feel appropriately huge, but its menacing sweep feels at odds with the hopeful quality of the lyrics. “Ain’t in LA” has cemented Adéla as a rising star among in-the-know pop fans, though, and I’m glad she’s found her niche.
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Charlotte Gaze: As we get deeper into the TikTok era of pop, I feel this is a recurring story: an upstart pop girl bursts onto the scene with a perfect face card, an immediately distinct sense of fashion, and perfectly 5/10 music. Maybe I’m oversimplifying matters. With Adéla in particular, the picture is easily expanded by her pre-2026 singles such as “DeathByDevotion” and “SexOnTheBeat”; the way they blended a cool DIY aesthetic with future pop and house sounds was not on the cutting edge, but they at least promised that her prospective breakthrough in the pop landscape might have some well-needed color. Now, with “Ain’t in LA” firmly planted on the Hot 100, it’s hard to argue any of that promise is followed through. Pleasantly middling tempo, friendly alt-pop chords, drums that hearken back to peak Halsey, the distorted voice of industry hack Theron Thomas, presenting identically to his role on “We Can’t Stop” — there’s charm, for sure, but no ambition. “I’d rather be a nobody than to be like everyone,” Adéla preaches as a sort of tongue-in-cheek small-town proverb. As for me, I’d rather be a somebody than a nobody.
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Nortey Dowuona: Theron Thomas, part of the R.City duo and songwriter to the stars, thus has no distinct voice. Between his Tyla dance bop, his FLO hard R&B banger, and his Juice WRLD & Kid Laroi hip hop pop saunter, I hear no connecting thread — which is a mark of quality in a music industry that demands flexibility and frictionless collaborations from its songwriters and producers (but not the celebrities). Never is there a holding pattern in the drums, melodies or words, which gives Thomas the smooth movement between R&B, hip hop and pop that allows him to make a living as a producer, present a great pitch deck to the seventh member of Katseye, and make her the first Slovak{!?) artist to break in America. Then again, Tyla was the first South African artist in recent memory to crack America with her own indigenous sound, which hasn’t allowed her the ability to integrate any further. Maybe Adela should join the Thomas brothers behind the decks ASAP.
[5]
Joshua Lu: The biggest issue with PRIMA is how nearly every song sounds like a legally distinct but sonically undeniable imitation of another artist. This trend was evident even with its prerelease singles: “KGB” sounds like a JADE album track, and “Red Bottoms” is just a Tate McRae scrap. At least “Ain’t in LA” has the most interesting reference point in Bangerz-era Miley Cyrus, namely “We Can’t Stop.” The hazy trap-pop vibe perfectly complements Adéla’s disillusioned cries and adds a needed dimension to her lyricism, which sometimes gives way to platitudes. Bonus points for the amusement in watching the Dream Academy Porkchop get an actual TikTok trend, while Hybe’s slop machine tirelessly works to that same end.
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Hannah Jocelyn: What if “We Can’t Stop” wasn’t the worst song of that entire era?
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Katherine St. Asaph: Apologies to all Zoomers and Alphas reading this, but I have rarely felt the generational gap harder than I did upon hearing “Ain’t in LA”: a 22-year-old’s nostalgic recreation of Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop,” born out of memories that based on this song seem to include no controversy whatsoever. For an aging millennial like me who lived through 2013 — through Bangerz and the 2013 VMAs and Twerkgate and the surrounding social-justice context that’s since been memorialized (equally inaccurately) as “Woke 1.0” — the very concept is incomprehensible. That’s not the only contortion of the nostalgia, though. Realistically speaking, if this unsung dreamer has posters of Madonna and Destiny’s Child, that would make her… probably also a millennial, 25 years ago. Less superficially, the other Miley single this evokes is “Party in the USA,” in how it subverts the pop-cultural trope of escaping your dead-end town to chase your dreams of fame in The City. The moral of Miley’s song is that fame is universal, embracing city and country alike. Adéla rebukes things even harder: pop culture lied to you, so sell your fast car, stop living on a prayer, stay put in your parents’ spare room, and learn to love the ordinary. In 2026, that message is somewhat on the nose, a little too eager to be called a “recession indicator.” And even if Adéla meant to be sincere (no reason to doubt that), the actual song she has released is patronizing in the same way as Katy Perry’s “Firework” was. “All of the girls in them unknown cities” — a line that’s revealingly out-of-touch, given that there are many settlements smaller than cities — may well hear “you’re so unique, don’t look like anyone” as condescending, especially when followed by a pop star’s proclamation that “I’d rather be a nobody than to be like everyone.” The mathematical logic here — there exists a unique baddie X, that shares no properties with the members of the universal set “anyone,” but also X is no one and there are enough of them to make Adéla blow up on Spotify — is as baffling as the message is confused. Which is it: is your audience (that) somebody, or are they nobody? Don’t tell: they’d advertise, you know.
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Leah Isobel: The calculation is a little too transparent — strip out the spikier elements of her persona, leaving only “bad bitch” and “not from America” — but “Ain’t in LA” scratches the edge of something interesting. American-ness, in and outside of pop music, is reaching new depths of violent worthlessness every day; as a consequence, or perhaps as a cause, American image-manufacturers struggle to approach the meaninglessness of their context. Adéla is enough of an outsider to recognize that inherent meaninglessness, and enough of an insider to have access to the tools that her peers use in less complicated ways. Listening to this song, I get the sense of a power vacuum, the chorus’s negation leaving an ambiguous gap. The baddest bitches ain’t in LA — so where are they now? Adéla’s voice echoes over empty space, waiting for a reply.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Now, I of course see what Adéla is trying to do here. 18 million people live in greater LA; 8.3 billion live outside of it. By the pure and brute force of statistics, it stands to reason that the baddest bitches would be outside of the metropolitan area at hand; even if that weren’t true, the target market is larger. It does, however, detract from the underlying point here that the only specific place named in the song is, in fact, Los Angeles; shouting out the (generically) “unique” girls in the “unknown cities” (to be named later) doesn’t quite cut it. Everything here is one step too vague, an empowerment number shot in soft focus delivered by a singer much better at delivering sharp shocks.
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Jessica Doyle: Tasteful to the point of blandness, as if the first draft included some very specific Bratislava callouts, and then someone reminded Adéla (or, more likely, Adéla reminded herself) that the more generic her lyrics, the more non-American dreamers she might reach. What’s frustrating is that she already presented her case more memorably: “I was like eiiiiiiiight working the night shift to learn English” may be my favorite lyric of the year. Unknown-city-dwellers, if this works for you, lovely, but don’t neglect the back catalogue.
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Julian Axelrod: As an LA native who moved to the Midwest, I always have to remind people that there are plenty of Angelenos who live normal lives and work non-industry jobs. So I have to respect Adéla’s ethos of “Everyone in LA is busted, everyone in the Midwest is hot,” even if the song itself doesn’t delve much deeper than that. I’m not sure what tooth gems and doing donuts in the rain have to do with staying in your hometown, but maybe pitched-down vocals are the great regional unifier.
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Jel Bugle: I like the chorus and the slowed-down guy talking. It’s a bit like Miley Cyrus, though, let’s be honest.
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Al Varela: Surprisingly, this works for me! The main factor is that it doesn’t have the dead-eyed malaise of “We Can’t Stop”. Rather, Adéla makes a point to actually celebrate what she has: thriving and embracing all the things she is, rather than what she aspires to be. “Ain’t in LA” doesn’t resent Los Angeles so much as recognize that Adéla can be a bad bitch and live life to the fullest right there in her home of Slovakia. The shout-along hook does a lot to make this anthemic, and the 2010s pop throwback sound that conjured up images of “We Can’t Stop” in the first place taps into that era’s lust for life.
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Andrew Karpan: Further pointing backward like a series of yellow arrows appearing in a dream, it’s hard to imagine the feeling isn’t also recycled itself; if not from Miley, than perhaps from Lorde, the consummate YouTube outsider who learned to bore herself as an insider. And yet. Isn’t this a record that also sounds like the rattling of the dashboard on the 101, a kind of grey haze, the wind whipping through the open window, driving through and ever back again?
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Ian Mathers: The messaging of the song is already pretty clear (especially in the very fun video — those Slovakian kids dancing along are adorable), but I found it even more poignant and endearing after looking up context. Adéla said the following about seeing an old picture of her mom while working on the song: “It made me think, ‘There are so many beautiful girls with dreams who will never get their flowers like my mom.’ I wrote this for her and the billion other bitches who are probably cooler than me.” It’s that last bit I especially love; there’s no insecurity radiating off Adéla’s songs at all, but she possesses the kind of confidence that’s comfortable with there being cooler bitches out there. Couple that with a truly great chorus (although it was even better when I initially heard “I know that you might wanna escape” as “I know you think you running this game”), an emotional tone that makes me think of this as a mirror twin of Chappell Roan’s “California,” and a bonus point just for the tariffs of it all (sorry, my cool American friends, I know it’s not your fault), and this is my favourite Adéla song yet.
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David Allun Jones: There are some cool biographical details scattered about here that hint of a better song (or screenplay) in the making. Adéla’s humble beginnings — bowing at the altar of her TRL idols, dressed in her hand-me-down best, kicking things off nice and doing donuts in the rain in a Honda Civic — make for a deliciously stupid visual. Compare this, though, to Lorde’s “Royals”, a far more engrossing glimpse at American pop culture from an outside gaze, and it falls as flat as the anony-vocals do. Finding pride in your own region and personal swag is good and all, but if the result feels like a C-grade Xerox of that same thing you “don’t gotta run away” to, do we need it? Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop” White-girl twerked so that “Ain’t In LA” could even more awkwardly gyrate booty cheeks to a vibey chopped-and-screwed soundtrack. Something tells me the baddest of Los Angeles bitches aren’t threatened at all.
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Kayla Beardslee: Ironic that a song about embracing the value of people, places, and lifestyles outside the norm can’t deliver a fresher sound than lethargic “We Can’t Stop” nostalgia. Extra demerits for making me revisit the Miley song and remember why we left it in the past in the first place.
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Taylor Alatorre: The Bangerz sound was never fully explored, by Miley or by anyone. To an extent that’s because it couldn’t be. Those notes of off-kilter gloss are the product of an insecure striver, the kind who performs normality with the constant awareness that she’s being graded on it. That latent outsider anxiety is why trap-pop math exercises like “Do My Thang” sound so strange in their familiarity, and why “Wrecking Ball” still stands alone as a genre of one. “We Can’t Stop,” of course, is the totemic center of it all, representing the frictionless, synchronous moment when Miley and the Zeitgeist became a forever-fused entity: the Sound of 2013. Adéla, another outsider who keenly wants to be let inside, could hardly have selected a better model for her own introduction. She holds the banner high for the “girls in them unknown cities,” and of course she means the non-American ones like her Slovakian mother, as well as others living even further away from the centers of the global meaning-making industry. But the sound she’s chosen is pure American heartland-pop — road-trip sentimentalism, Coachella-sized choruses, a shut-in teen’s imagination of what a house party feels like — and “Ain’t in LA” is all the better for it. Rather than chasing some phantom form of cultural hybridity, Adéla simply self-inserts into her hand-picked American mythos, yet in a way that highlights her stylish sense of remove. It’s more fun, she says, to be a less-than-attached observer to it all. For now, at least, she clearly means it.
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