How Well Do You Know Adele? Trivia Quiz

Trivia Quizzes Music

Adele has released exactly four studio albums in her entire career, and named every single one after her age at the time she was writing it, a simple, almost stubbornly literal naming convention that turns her whole discography into a running diary of heartbreak, growth, and recovery told in real time. That’s a rare thing in modern pop, an artist whose commercial success has only grown while her actual creative approach has stayed almost defiantly old-fashioned: enormous, live-sounding vocals, and lyrics built around specific real relationships rather than vague sentiment.

A vocal cord hemorrhage cancelled most of her touring in 2011, at the precise moment 21 was outselling everything else on the planet, and it was serious enough that she underwent laser microsurgery in Boston that November and was ordered into weeks of complete silence afterwards. Her first performance following the operation was Rolling in the Deep at the Grammy ceremony in February 2012, an evening on which she collected six awards including Album of the Year, and the fact that the voice came back intact is a reasonable candidate for the single most consequential event of her career.

The albums themselves function as a chronology anyone can date. A friend uploaded her demo to MySpace in 2006 while she was still finishing at the BRIT School in Croydon, XL Recordings signed her off the back of it, and 19 arrived in January 2008 as the work of a teenager sorting out a first serious breakup. 21 followed in 2011 and spent twenty-four weeks at the top of the American album chart, finishing as the best-selling record of both that year and the next. 25 opened in November 2015 with more than three million copies sold in the United States in seven days, a first-week figure nothing had approached in the era of tracked sales. 30, released in November 2021, deals with her divorce and its effect on her young son directly enough that one track is built around recorded voice memos of the two of them talking.

Her working method leans on a small circle of collaborators rather than a rotating cast of producers. Paul Epworth built Rolling in the Deep with her in a single session after she arrived at the studio furious; Dan Wilson, formerly of Semisonic, sat with her and an acoustic guitar for Someone Like You, a song her label reportedly worried was too bare to release as a single before it went to number one in both Britain and America. Skyfall, written with Epworth for the 2012 Bond film, took the Academy Award for Best Original Song the following spring. When 30 came out she asked Spotify to stop defaulting albums to shuffle, and the company changed the setting.

The public persona has stayed unusually consistent through all of it, the north London accent intact, the between-song talk at concerts loose and profane in a way that sits oddly against the devastation of the material, which is roughly the appeal. Her Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace, delayed by a year and announced through a tearful video message, ran on that same contrast.

The basics are easy enough: the voice, the numbered titles, three or four singles anyone would recognize from a supermarket. The tougher material wants precision, like the naming convention applied across every record, which single became one of the best-selling songs ever released after a specific breakup, and where she grew up. The full answer key sits beneath the quiz, which makes the gaps between the radio hits and the deeper catalog easy to see.