Missing out on Katseye was the best thing to happen to this rising pop star

Adela, Prima

★★★★★

Failure can be a difficult stench to shake for aspiring pop stars. For Adela Jergova, the Slovak singer-songwriter who’s about to become your favourite new pop star, it could’ve proved terminal.

Her public debut to most was on Netflix’s Pop Star Academy: Katseye, where she was one of the desperate hopefuls who didn’t make the cut for the global K-pop girl group Katseye. On that series she was an elder mentor of sorts at 18, a favourite among the industry experts for her strong singing and dancing skills but a complete bust among the fan votes. In the end she was the first contestant eliminated, her pop dreams dashed unbearably close to the dangling carrot.

Considering what’s happened to Katseye in their short history – just last month they lost their second member to a “health hiatus” – Jergova’s outcome on the show looks like a blessing. Almost four years on she has built an aesthetic identity on her own Eurotrash terms, and now a debut album that’s the best pop baptism since Addison.

On Prima, the cast-off narrative serves her persona well: she’s the rebellious pop outsider the corporate machine couldn’t control, a lone wolf with something to prove. (Never mind that she’s signed to Capitol Records, an imprint of the behemoth Universal Music Group; illusion is the language of pop.)

Raucous opener KGB dives straight into her story, with dirty electro-pop that plays on her ethnic background. She’s the kid in post-communist Eastern Europe, plotting her pop future by studying Disney Channel stars and Y2K-era MTV videos ’til her eyes are “bloody”. “I was like eight, working the night shift to learn English,” she sings over glitchy handbag house – the hip production credits include 100 Gecs’ Dylan Brady and The Dare’s Harrison Patrick Smith – marrying her pop aspirations to the wider immigrant struggle.

Her songs showcase the exacting detail of her pop studies. Stellar lead single Ain’t in LA – with its loser reclamation, “I’d rather be a nobody than be like everyone!” – blends Miley’s We Can’t Stop with Salem’s chopped and screwed wooziness, while Nicole Kidman bizarrely borrows Kanye’s golden-era chiptune soul, a handful of tacky references to Our Nicole (“Moulin Rouge, my corset is so tight/Babygirl in control, I feel like Nicole”) and somehow makes it feel effortlessly fun.

Boys and Fantasize, meanwhile, throw back to In the Zone-era Britney, all head voice and coquettish whispers. It’s enough to get you excited for Adela’s inevitable MTV VMAs performance (Jergova has trained in ballet since she was three), once you’re done doing your own hip thrusts and hair-whips in the kitchen.

But it’s the personal indulgences that make Prima essential pop. On Therapy, a devastating stream of consciousness that takes Charli XCX’s tilt towards vulnerability to its extreme, she sings raspily about the sacrifices she’s made for her pop aspirations, such as leaving her family behind in Slovakia and not seeing her sister grow up, and the drive behind it all (“I wanna move my mum out here, but I don’t have that kinda money”).

It’s definitely not the sort of thing you’d get to make being in a girl group for K-pop conglomerate Hybe. Adela’s infectious attitude on Prima reminds us you can’t spell failure without an “f” and “u”. Robert Moran

Dinosaur Jr, There Near

★★★

As someone who has interviewed Dinosaur Jr main man J Mascis more than once, I can confidently say the man prefers to speak through his guitar. He has the demeanour of a sloth in conversation, and his wall of Marshall amps makes all the noise he needs to communicate.

No wheels are reinvented on the 13th Dinosaur Jr album, which is fair enough, but at times it’s like, “Is this actually the same wheel?” Several Got Away has the familiarly fuzzy guitars, yawning vocals and teeth-rattling solo that have made songs like The Wagon so enduring, even if it is the sonic equivalent of a shrug. Everything is cranked to 11 – so far, so normal – until you get to Take Me With You and realise that Mascis’s amps must actually go to 12.

There’s not much point quoting lyrics. Mascis himself points out in the album bio, “I try not too hard to think about any of it”, and the lyric sheet backs this up.

Bass player Lou Barlow gets his obligatory two songs, the mid-paced kiss-off Blowin’ Up and the pointed No One’s Ready, where the recurring line “no one’s ready for your war” leaves little doubt about his target.

So yeah, it’s a “not bad” Dinosaur Jr album. Mascis probably wouldn’t say much more than that, so neither will I. Barry Divola

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