21 Review

The scale of its success has obscured how carefully it is made. Rolling in the Deep starts on a strummed guitar and builds on stomps and hand claps, a sound that still cuts through a supermarket at any volume. Rumour Has It is loose and funny. Set Fire to the Rain is the most conventional thing here and the arrangement earns its size. Then Someone Like You closes it with a piano, one voice and a lyric that does the hardest thing in songwriting, which is to be gracious and devastated in the same sentence.

The writing is what makes the album more than a collection of hits. It has an arc: the anger comes first, the bargaining in the middle, the surrender last, and it is convincing in that order. The voice carries every stage of it, the fury and the defeat sung with the same control and never oversold, so the feeling holds from the opening stomp to the closing piano. Paul Epworth and Rick Rubin keep the productions unfashionable on purpose, and Rubin built his sessions around live instruments to catch the way she sounds on stage, so nothing dates. It is careful work that serves the voice rather than competing with it, and the S belongs to the songs and the singing.

It won six Grammys in one night, album of the year among them, with record and song of the year for Rolling in the Deep, and it spent twenty four weeks at number one in America, longer than any album since 1985. It is the best-selling album of this century. A perfectly executed record about a completely ordinary event, which is why it travelled as far as it did.