The first time I listened to “Prima,” one thought hit me before the first track was over: this is what it must have felt like to be there when Madonna first came out.
Very dramatic, I know. Madonna is a pillar of pop history, and Adéla is a 22-year-old with a debut album. But I wasn’t comparing pop divas. I was comparing the feeling of someone walking into a genre like she already owns the room and making you believe it.
A debut with a plan
Adéla Jergová, a native of Slovakia, was eliminated from the “The Debut: Dream Academy,” series that produced Katseye. Her album makes it clearer than ever that a group couldn’t contain her. After a summer on festival stages, “Prima” feels like the payoff. The record is only about 31 minutes long, and it never wastes them.
The album’s title translates to “first,” and it also nods to the top of the ballet world, where Adéla trained. That’s fitting for an album about striving. As she says on the opener “KGB”, “No, I’m not being cocky, I just worked my whole life.” Executive-produced by Dylan Brady and Blake Slatkin, it jumps between styles, with flashes of Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga, and early Charli xcx. One minute, she’s the confident pop star; the next, she’s breathy and flirty. Then she shows a more vulnerable side on a ballad like “Therapy.”
It isn’t flawless. The critical response has been favorable but split: Metacritic lists a Metascore of 68 across nine reviews, with Variety on the glowing end and Pitchfork on the skeptical end. Some critics have said the lead single “KGB” tries too hard to prove her ambition, and a few fans want tighter songwriting. It’s understandable. But for me,Adéla’s star quality comes through. She’s easy to root for.
My favorite moment is the closer, “Ain’t in LA.” The NME review describes it as an anthem of anti-escapism, a celebration of meeting yourself wherever you are, whether that’s Bratislava, Leipzig, or a small rural town. It’s about home, and it’s a perfect picture of this generation of pop stars. Their path to fame doesn’t run through one American city anymore.
The nostalgia trap
My Madonna comparison is a bit complicated. Madonna sounded like the future. Prima doesn’t, at least not exactly. Slant points out that the album harkens back to early-to-mid 2010s music, when Adéla was a young girl in Bratislava absorbing American pop culture.
So is she just a nostalgia act?
I don’t think so, and I think that question is the trap. Because we’re so wrapped up in the “throwbacks” right now — the 2010s playlists, the Y2K revival, the “pop girlies are back” discourse — it’s easy to treat every new pop star as a rerun. When you’re nostalgic, you tend to see an artist as a copy of what you loved, not as the start of something new.
But think about how Madonna worked. She borrowed heavily from the club and disco scenes that came before her. She took familiar sounds and used them to announce herself. I think that’s what Adéla is doing too: using the sounds she grew up on as raw material, not as a ceiling. Take a listen to Nicole Kidman, a fan favorite track with sultry confident lyrics. The track pays homage to the critically acclaimed actress while Adéla puts her own spin on the sound and the visuals.
Nostalgia isn’t a weakness in pop. It’s a language. What matters is whether the artist has something new to say in it.
The new pop family
This is where the bigger picture comes in. Adéla doesn’t exist in a vacuum. She’s part of a group of women who are redefining what a pop star can be, and it doesn’t look like a single sound or a single place.
Olivia Rodrigo proved that pop-rock heartbreak could still dominate the charts, and that fans want songs that feel like intimate diary entries. Tyla, from South Africa, brought a global, amapiano-influenced sound into the mainstream and showed that pop doesn’t need to be American to go worldwide. PinkPantheress turned short, jittery, internet-native songs into pop music in their own right. Addison Rae, who started on TikTok, has shown that a former social media star can reinvent herself with a serious, stylish pop identity. And Zara Larsson, a pop veteran from Sweden, is enjoying a real comeback, proving that this new wave is also making space for the women who’ve been in the game for a while.
None of these artists sound alike, and they shouldn’t. This isn’t the old pop princess model where one star wears the crown. It feels more like a family: different personalities, different sounds, different corners of the world, all sharing the same stage. Adéla, a Slovak ballerina turned pop hopeful who found her breakout moment on festival stages across Europe and beyond, fits right in.
Why the Madonna feeling matters
When Madonna broke through, people weren’t just hearing songs. They were watching someone take control of her image, her sound, and her career. That’s what I felt on Prima: not a perfect album, but a clear voice and a clear plan.
It’s beautiful to see the emergence of these new pop stars. We spend so much time gazing back at the stars that already shine in the history books that we miss the constellation forming right above our heads.
Pop doesn’t need a single princess anymore. It has a whole family, and Prima is Adéla’s way of pulling up a chair at the table.
Rating: 4.4/5