While Charli ADÉLA, nothing less than ballet. The former contestant of Dream Academy, the competition that produced the girl group KATSEYE – of which she barely ended up being a part – has returned in style with a single with more meaning than it seems.
Going higher and higher, ADÉLA looks back on ‘KGB’, a song where she explains her origins and her path to stardom using the metaphor of the KGB, the secret police and intelligence agency of the Soviet Union. “I’m a spy, I’ve studied this shit, call me KG-Bitch,” she declares in the chorus.
ADÉLA, who is Slovak, has ballet training, and we see her doing pointe in the ‘KGB’ clip, where she later performs another intense choreography. The musical background, however, looks directly at the club, being an absolute blast of runway house, impossible not to compare with ‘brat’, given the producers involved (among them, The Dare) and the autobiographical nature of the lyrics.
«I was a European girl plotting my promotion; At 18 years old, an immigrant, he was a star in the making. “I’m not being arrogant, it’s just that I’ve worked all my life,” he expresses in a half-sung, half-spoken tone. ADÉLA reveals that she worked night shifts to learn English, and this experience of night work makes her compare herself to the KGB for her stealthiness.
In the video, ADÉLA clarifies that her use of the KGB symbol is purely artistic and that she in no way supports the former spy agency: “As a person who grew up in Slovakia, it was impossible to escape the harmful influence of the Soviet Union,” she indicates at the end of the video in a “disclaimer,” noting that she does not at all “support the Russian government” and that she positions herself on the side of Ukraine.
