Twelve hours later, the Slovakian pop renegade bounces around a light-filled rehearsal room at the English National Ballet School, spinning like a whirling dervish in a black Chanel gown for her British Vogue shoot, still in the thick of an August heatwave. If Adéla is tired, she doesn’t let on. “I think because I’m 22… that helps,” she says with a mischievous grin as we sit down afterwards, running her talon-like acrylic nails through her signature pink locks. (She’s recently dyed her hair a deeper, dirtier magenta in place of her previous pastel hue: “My fans say I gain more power the pinker my hair gets.”) Her gaze falls on the ballet barres and mirrored walls, and she pauses: Adéla has history here, having moved from Bratislava to study dance in these exact rooms as a 15-year-old. “I met one of my best friends, Luca, here—he was my first fan,” she recalls. “He was like, ‘I feel like you could be a pop star.’ So I have fond memories of this place.”
Adéla’s journey to becoming this year’s most-buzzed-about music breakout has been uncommonly well-documented. Originally cast in 2023 as a contestant for the K-pop reality show that formed Katseye, she was booted out early partly because—despite becoming a fan favorite in Netflix’s subsequent docuseries—the judges sensed she was destined for solo stardom. She seized upon the exposure, independently releasing her early songs and music videos and building a cult following among internet pop savants, then signing with Capitol Records in 2025 and releasing her debut EP, The Provocateur, last summer to rave reviews. (The eye-popping album artwork features Adéla pulling up her dress and urinating in the street; you can understand why she was never built for the clean-cut confines of a manufactured pop group.)
