After a four-year stretch in which she struggled through depression and divorce, she returned with 2016’s triumphant, electronically tinged Long Live the Angels.
On her debut album, 2012’s Our Version of Events, she blended R&B and pop with orchestral strings and rhythms descended from decades of club music-a bold, buoyant sound, swollen with feeling and the perfect match for her unstoppably expressive voice. Born Adele Emily Sandé in Sunderland in 1987, she took early inspiration from her Zambian choirmaster father, then got her start featuring on singles by Tinie Tempah and Wiley. That duality resonates in the Scottish singer/songwriter’s unique brand of adult-contemporary soul music, which focuses her powerhouse voice on more intimate questions of honesty and self-knowledge. “To be able to have that privacy with someone is something I don’t take for granted,” she tells Apple Music. Emeli Sandé is no stranger to crowds-she performed to roughly a billion people at the London 2012 Olympics-but she knows that music’s deepest meaning is often experienced alone.