By Kuya Allen
When I saw Adéla was booked at the depot I thought there was no way. One of the worlds hottest stars right now booked in a 1,200 person capped venue?
Then I found out the show was booked 18 months ago. Before Ain't in LA, Nicole Kidman, Prima… And I realized how lucky our city is that her booked her tour when they did.
Adéla is only going to get hotter.
See there's other cool artists in music and fashion, it's not even a talking point anymore. You have to have something else about you besides just talent and looks.
But once in a while you get an artist that has this X factor about them. They give you something you just can't get anywhere else, and they're driven by something deeper than being rich and famous.
Their story stands for something. It means something to people.
That's a generational talent, and after watching Adéla perform, I believe she is one of those artists.
The First thing that stuck out in her performance was her movement.
She started ballet at three in Moscow. Vienna State Ballet as a teenager. English National Ballet School in London. Then she put it down and moved to Los Angeles to study music.
You can see all of it on stage, and not in the way people usually mean when they say a pop artist "dances." Ballet leaves something in the body that reads differently. It's in how she holds a line when she isn't doing anything. It's in the control underneath the looseness, the way a movement finishes instead of just ending. And god damn can she whip her hair.
Watching it, the thought that kept arriving was that this person has not spent her life on anything else. There was no backup plan running in parallel. It's all in there. This is what she was meant to do.
Her story was something that deeply resonated with me. Cool kid, born in a not cool city.
"Ain't in LA" is a song about being the baddest thing to come out of Slovakia, and I want to be careful about how I say why that landed the way it did here.
tmrw is based in Salt Lake City. Not New York, not London, not Los Angeles. And there is a specific kind of work that comes with building something you believe is world-class from a place the world has already decided isn't where world-class things come from. You carry a small, permanent argument around with you. You answer the same question at every door. Nobody is waiting for you.
Bratislava knows that. Salt Lake knows that.
What she does with it is the part worth studying. She doesn't apologize for where she's from, and she doesn't turn it into a sob story either. She holds it up as the whole point. The distance from there to here isn't an obstacle in the narrative, it's the proof. There's a version of that song that's defensive. Hers isn't. Hers is a flex, and the room full of people in a valley surrounded by mountains understood exactly what was being flexed.
We came to film a show. We left with something closer to a permission slip.
She closed the show with a manifestation she invited the crowd into.
"I want to sing until my voice gives out." She said, after explaining all the things in her career she was grateful for. Including the girl group rejection, and the hardship. Her candidness and vulnerability through the performance was heart warming.
Then, as she crumpled a piece of paper ripped out of her notebook that she wrote on, she ended her ritual with her final manifestation. "And a nice sitting pair of tits", she said as she threw her paper into the crowd. Then cheekily transitioned into her Nicole Kidman performance to close out the show.
That duality of her saying something genuinely deep and heart felt, and then exploding into something chaotic has to be my favorite thing about her. It's like reading the most beautiful poetry off the wall of a dive bar bathroom, just to see a crudely drawn dick right next to it.
I'm grateful that a show of this caliber was booked at such a small venue, in a city like ours, was booked before her absolute meteoric rise. Some of the crowd that was there may not have gotten to catch her, maybe she wouldn't have even been booked in our city.