Laura Dockrill Pushes Back on Claims That Adele’s 30 Lacks New Ideas

A major music magazine’s 6/10 rating of Adele’s 2021 album 30 reignited a familiar critique — that Adele is repeating the template of 21 and 25 and leaning once again on piano-led heartbreak. The review suggested the record was simply “more of the same,” with the claim that the singer had “run out of ideas.”

Laura Dockrill — a writer, and one of Adele’s closest childhood friends — publicly rejected that framing and argued that critics were judging innovation by trend rather than substance.

Dockrill’s reply avoided industry vocabulary and instead pointed at motive. Her argument was that Adele’s songwriting is not built for shock value and not built to chase whatever is chart dominant at the moment. She said Adele does not choose influences based on fashion cycles — she writes autobiographically.

“You want her to rap or sing trap to ‘innovate’?” she asked, adding that the album is “the story of her life,” not an attempt to chase what is trendy.

Dockrill also referenced what she saw directly — the writing of “I Drink Wine.” She said she was in the room for that process and described it not as a set of calculations but as emotional labor. Her view is that the album is a document of a divorce, not an exercise in re-packaging past work.

The contrast between the review and the rebuttal shows the tension that often follows Adele: whether her value is measured by how she reinvents her sound, or by how faithfully she narrates what she is living through. Dockrill’s argument lands on the latter — that the sincerity in 30 is not repetition, but continuity.