Adele is back. The singer who famously takes her sweet time between albums confirmed rumors that she’s planning to rev the machine back up on Tuesday (Oct. 5) with a tantalizing 10-second musical tease of her upcoming single “Easy On Me.” And though she didn’t unwrap any of the vocals for the gentle piano ballad due out Oct. 15, she did preview what appeared to be the video for the track in a 17-second clip.
In it, Adele pops an old-school cassette with the song’s title on it into her car’s tape deck, cranks up the volume and lets her left arm catch the wind as she drives down the road while piles of sheet music fly into the air and we catch a glimpse of the packed trailer she’s hauling behind her vintage ride. The visual only gives us a small view of the singer’s eyes, hands and a portion of her face, but the whole vibe is unmistakably Adele to the core.
The preview came a day after the singer returned to Twitter after a nine-month hiatus with the simple message, “Hiya babes.” Earlier Monday, fans started buzzing when Adele updated her Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube pages with a teal blue background that matched mysterious billboards that popped up around the world last week.
Speculation about her fourth album was sparked by billboards that popped up in random areas across the world featuring the number 30. Landmarks in New York, London and Paris also had the number 30 projected on the side of buildings, prompting fans to speculate that the album is titled 30 to follow the format of her previous number-themed releases 25, 21 and 19.
The singer’s previous album, 2015’s 25, had a record-smashing first week, selling 3.38 million copies in its debut week in the U.S. That was the biggest sales week of an album since Nielsen (now MRC Data) began tracking point-of-sale music purchases in 1991. It was so massive that it sold 335 copies per minute in its first week on sale in the U.S., with 1.71 million copies coming on CD, comprising 38 percent of all albums sold on CD in the week ending Nov. 26, 2015 (4.54 million).
Check out the “Easy On Me” preview below.
