Bathed in lights and with a smile on her face, Adéla stood before a sweaty, sardine-packed crowd at the Roxy in late October. “This is the first and last time I’m doing a show this small,” she told the audience before they let out a seismic roar. “So thank you.” In a 40-minute set, Adéla moved effortlessly between ballet-inspired bar routines, floor choreography, and a cover of a Britney Spears song. The crowd included some of her earliest champions and self-declared Adéla stans: Troye Sivan, Rachel Sennott, and Demi Lovato, who just days later would announce Adéla as the opener for her 2026 arena tour.
“Adéla is pop perfection, not only is she an incredible dancer, but she has the vocals and songwriting to match,” Lovato tells Rolling Stone. “She has such an edge and unique vibe that makes her so special.”
It’s been a whirlwind year for the 21-year-old rising star, who first caught the world’s attention last year on Pop Star Academy, the Netflix competition series chronicling the formation of the girl group that became Katseye. Back then, Adéla stood out as one of the show’s strongest dancers and a big-sister figure to her fellow contestants. To the shock of many fans, she was one of the first to be eliminated on the show. Now, she calls it a blessing in disguise, one that set her on the path to launching her career.
“I just have never imagined myself doing anything else but this,” Adéla tells me. “Even being at the shows — I don’t know how to communicate this without sounding insane, but I’ve visualized it so many times that when I actually got up onstage before my first show, I was not nervous. I’m just like, ‘Oh, we’re home.’ “
I meet Adéla on a late October afternoon at a diner in Hollywood for some pancakes and whipped cream. She arrives with her pink hair flowing over her leather jacket, and her glistening bleached brows peeking over some sunglasses. She walks in with her phone in hand, and the album cover of Lily Allen’s West End Girl on bright display.
When I tell her my favorite song from the new project is “Pussy Palace” — one of many tracks where Allen appears to address her separation from husband David Harbour — she holds up her phone to show it’s the exact song she was listening to on her way to lunch. “I can’t believe he would do that to her!” Adéla says. “Because now we know everything. We know about the lube. We know about the butt plugs, the sex toys, the Trojans.”
Throughout the interview, Adéla’s eyes gleam as she talks about other pop artists. It’s clear she’s studied them closely, and they’ve inspired her artistic output. Her deep analysis of pop culture and artistry has been her M.O. from even before she started putting out music. “Pop culture to me is what World War II is to a middle-aged man,” she says with a giggle. “You know everything about guns, I know everything about this.” The subjects of Charli XCX, Madonna, and Ariana Grande all come up naturally in conversations.
Jason Renaud*
As a little girl growing up in Slovakia, Adéla knew she wanted to pursue stardom. “It was since the first time I watched Hannah Montana. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m doing that,’” she says. As a kid, she watched the dubbed version of the show in Slovak, and had no clue that Miley Cyrus’ character was meant to be American. Once her older brother broke the news, her gears started to turn: “‘How am I going to be on Disney Channel? How am I going to do this?’” she remembers. “So I started learning English from watching interviews of Demi, Miley, and acting like I’m being interviewed on Ellen, in my room, just talking to myself, to the walls. It was really fucking weird and nobody knew that I was doing it either.”
Within a year, Adéla says she learned how to speak fluently and with no accent, mimicking the voices of the Disney queens she saw on TV. She remembers having a whole plan for her future: She looked up Disney Channel’s address and wrote it down on a piece of paper as a form of manifestation. “If I learn English by the time I’m 15, I’m going to L.A. for pilot season,” she remembers telling herself. “I had a plan.”
Of course, that didn’t happen. Instead, she dove deep into ballet, the sort of high-brow art form her father encouraged her to pursue and a more common artistic pathway for girls like her in Eastern Europe. She was so good at ballet that she moved out of her home at 14 to pursue it professionally, living on her own in Vienna and London. “I was like, OK, this is the way to get onstage,” she says. “Ballet is really great, because it’s very objective. Hard work makes you good, and being good gets you the big roles. So it’s very linear and it motivates you.”
But music — and Hannah Montana stardom — was always the goal. Ultimately, Adéla moved to the United States to compete on Pop Star Academy as part of Hybe and Geffen Records’ search for a global girl group. Despite being a favorite among her fellow contestants, she was eliminated from the group’s running early on. “We had no control over our own image, and I realized through that process — which is such a valuable lesson — that I’m not really good at being told what to do,” she says. “Some people are really good at that. I don’t have that ability.” (Plus, she made friends for life in that group: “We’re just forever trauma-bonded,” she says. “Nobody will know what it was like.”)
I remind her about a trailer Netflix posted introducing her as a contestant: her hair blonde, her eyes wide, excited to maybe find her big break. “I was a fucking baby,” she says, looking back at that time that feels like ages ago. (It was 2023.) “I had to be kicked off the show, bawl my eyes out for a little bit, and live in a shitty apartment. Those are the things I had to go through to fight for what I wanted to do.”
After getting booted off of Dream Academy, Adéla chose to stay in L.A. She got her GED while living in the attic of her vocal coach, Dave Stratton, and was taking writing sessions with anyone who’d allow her to join. “I was alone. I was deeply depressed. I was deeply confused,” she says. “I had no fucking idea what I was doing at all. And I knew no one.”
At the time, she was even making indie rock music. “It was really, really bad,” she says with a laugh. “It was because I came off the show and I was like, ‘Fuck pop.’ I was emo. And then as the months went on, I was like, ‘What am I doing?’ I love pop music. That’s all I’ve ever listened to.”
The return to pop quickly paid off. She started to work with Liam Benayon, a protégé of songwriting legend Bonnie McKee, to craft her first few songs. Together they released “Homewrecked,” a gritty electro-pop song about an infidelity she concocted in her head.
“When I met Adéla, I immediately noticed her intrinsic, perfect pop instincts. We were both just obsessed with pop music — I taught her about Madonna, she taught me about Beyoncé. We shared this deep infatuation with pop music,” Benayon tells Rolling Stone. “The first thing that struck me were her melodies and song structures. The entire post-chorus on ‘Homewrecked’ was her — all in one take. My jaw was on the floor.”
After “Homewrecked” came “Superscar,” which earned her a quick co-sign from Grimes, who appeared in the music video for “Machine Girl” earlier this year and declared Adéla a “future reigning popstar.” Over the summer, Adéla’s video for “SexOnTheBeat” featured a cameo from Christina Aguilera. Add Demi Lovato and Troye Sivan to the equation, plus 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady and Blake Slatkin as producers on her EP.
“For a second, I was like, why is everybody cool getting behind me? I had an imposter syndrome moment,” she says. “I always knew I was cool. You have to know it about yourself, because how the fuck would anybody else see it if you don’t know it? But then when other people start seeing it’s like, whoa, now it’s getting real. Now, I guess, I’m certified cool.”
Jason Renaud*
Her debut EP, The Provocateur, quickly generated buzz for its raunchy aesthetics and grimy electro0pop sound. The cover art shows Adéla urinating against a wall, seemingly mirroring photographer Sophy Rickett’s 1990s Pissing Women series. In the “SexOnTheBeat” video, she’s heard pleasuring herself before breaking into floor choreography in front of a laptop and dancing nude. In some visuals, she’s embraced the “girl group reject” persona — even donning a two-piece that reads “Doesn’t Work Well in Groups.” With her bright pink hair, pouty lips, bleached brows, and a fearless approach to nudity and sensuality, Adéla leans fully into provocation as part of her identity. And it lands, even if it’s polarizing to some.
“I’ve been told that I’m ugly a lot on the internet. People love to talk about my looks, and it’s so interesting, because I genuinely find myself beautiful. I think I like looking a little off-putting,” she says. “I think I’ve always pushed people’s buttons. And not necessarily because I want to or I enjoy being like an edgelord or anything like that, but I think I’m curious and I question a lot of things… And I think that is annoying to people and some people really like it. I was always super interested in that tension that my personality and my bluntness created.”
Adéla says she’s bringing in some of that energy into the first few studio sessions that she’s had as she works on her debut album. “I’m getting my own ducks in a row,” she says. “I need to write a manifesto to be like, ‘This is what this is.’ My EP was people realizing that Adéla is a good performer and artist, but I don’t think I’ve had the chance to build a world yet. I really want to do that with the album.”
Adéla recently went to an Addison Rae show and felt inspired by how clearly that new star was able to build a visual and musical world. “There’s an outfit, there’s a look, there’s a world, there’s an energy, there’s a color,” she says.
By her side to help build that world is her creative director, Chris Horan — stylist to stars like Charli XCX, Aguilera, and Lovato — who first reached out to her over DM when she only had a song or two out. Horan and Adéla created the Provocateur aesthetic of leotards, tapping into her ballet past and the avant-garde, almost alien-like looks that have accompanied her art and performances over the last year.
“I am actually exactly where I needed to be my entire life. I love being onstage. That’s where I feel truly myself,” she says. “That’s why I feel understood. Somehow I feel the most connected to me when I’m performing for you.”
For the new era, she plans to step away from The Provocateur’s “let me fuck with people a little bit” energy, she says, and instead deliver something that is more personal and where she can dissect herself in a way that translates to the music she enjoys creating. She debuted some unreleased songs called “Marijuana” and “NastyDirtyGross” during her show, and she still isn’t sure if they’ll make the album. “I was saying maybe ‘Nasty’ is going to be my ‘Medicine,’” she says of the unreleased Harry Styles song he only performs live but has never released. “I think we get stuck in, like, ‘Oh, promote a song, perform it, you release it.’ And I don’t know if I necessarily want to do that.”
What is for sure is that Adéla wants to sing on her debut album. “I don’t think anybody’s singing enough,” she says. “Except for a select few.” She’s not ready to talk about the production inspirations just yet, but she promises it’s “going to be a different vibe” than what people would expect.
“At the end of the day, I’m just a pop girl. I’m young, I’m going to be singing and I want to be dancing,” she says. “And I want to be really honest. And those are my north stars right now, and then we’ll see how that goes.”
