ADÉLA’s album, “PRIMA,” is currently one of the standout records of the moment. It has sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide in its first week, and the hits keep coming. Although “KGB” remains my favorite for its leaning toward European electro, “Ain’t in L.A.” has taken the lead, and now the singer has added another hit with “Nicole Kidman.”
Track 2 of the album keeps rising on Spotify’s Global chart and yesterday it climbed to position 12, while “Ain’t In L.A.” remains at number 5. “Nicole” is our Song of the Day today.
Apart from the commercial aspect, now beyond any doubt after being shared half a million times on TikTok, the track works on several levels. The most obvious is as a tribute to Nicole Kidman herself, who has reciprocated by sharing the track.
ADÉLA wrote the song thinking about her relationship with fame, and the track is ostentatious when it considers choosing between “Louboutins or Jimmy Choo’s.” But it also has a humorous and social-reflection angle: ADÉLA tried on a corset, felt “like Nicole,” and used it to think about the things male artists don’t wear.
The lyrics contain references to Nicole Kidman films such as “Moulin Rouge” or “Babygirl,” and taking things further, the video, in its modesty, also contains references to “Eyes Wide Shut” and “Reincarnation” (my favorite wink), which someone has already compiled on TikTok.
But the level at which “Nicole Kidman” works best is its production, as it proves how that early-2000s idea—so Kanye West and so Common—of reviving a lost classic, sampling it, and using it as the foundation for a current hit, can still be relevant. In fact, it bears a strong resemblance to “Bound 2” (2013), but it does not sample “Bound” from the 70s vocal group The Ponderosa Twins Plus One. In this case, the looping sample comes from “In My Father’s House,” a lost recording by a gospel group called God’s Gospel Angels. That recording isn’t on Spotify; it belongs to a 1986 album titled “Praise Him,” an album that almost nobody has bought or sold on Discogs. They have 29 users, they want 400.
Beyond all this, there is a final level in which “Nicole Kidman” works simply as background music—sexy, a pleasant tune to listen to without thinking about the actress, nor who sampled what, nor where the track is going viral. ADÉLA is singing that “her bra should be bigger” because people “don’t look her in the eyes,” so it wasn’t hard to imagine an audience for this after all…
