Somewhere on the road to Adultsville, Bellah found herself. But it wasn’t simple. The Londoner’s eagerness to deliver a follow-up to 2019’s Last Train Home and 2020’s The Art of Conversation was blighted by the pandemic and construction delays to the studio being built by close collaborator and Grammy-winning producer Ari PenSmith. “I was telling myself, ‘Just wait for the studio to be built,’” she tells Apple Music. “‘December, it’s going to be ready.’ December came, it wasn't ready. ‘January, it’s going to be ready. February, it’s going to be ready.’ And long story short, it wasn’t ready until May. So, a lot happened in those five months that really shook me but ultimately inspired a project like this. I’m very spiritual, and I do believe that God just threw him in my lap and said, ‘Here you go—here’s your best mate. Go make some music.’” Adultsville is the result of this close connection and a spirited manifesto on progressing through life’s trials. Also working with British R&B talents Sons of Sonix and J Warner, Bellah emerges on the other side with calls for spiritual protection on smooth Afrobeat tempos (“Evil Eye”), frustrations with right-person-wrong-time romances (“In The Moment”), and bouts of crippling self-doubt (“Always Something”). “The amount of things I went through during the recording process really encouraged me to say, ‘Oh, no, someone needs to talk about this phase of life,” she says. “Because absolutely no one else is talking about how weird of a time this is.” Here, she runs us through the EP, track by track. “Adultsville” “This feels like you’re moving into the city [of Adultsville]. It’s a new place, almost a new world, and it’s all of my feelings about adulthood. All of the new experiences I’m facing for the first time—this project is how I feel about them.” “Prototype” “I wrote this when I was angry at my manager. I told him, ‘You’re treating me like a kid, and I’m an adult.’ It’s weird. You want people to respect the transition, but in a way, you’re scared of it yourself. This is about growing and evolving, and how that growth is going to be really, really uncomfortable for some people. They won’t accept the new version of you. And so, I say, ‘You fell in love with the prototype’ because there’s a version of me that no longer exists. I felt it necessary to kill that version of me. And if you can’t respect that, you’re going to have to leave.” “Garden” “It’s very easy to love someone that’s healed. It is a bigger task and, dare I say, a bigger act of love to stay by someone who is really damaged. This is about trying to love someone through their trauma and how difficult that is. I wrote this track as reassurance: ‘I won’t do you like Eve did Adam in the Garden. I won’t lead you astray or do anything to jeopardize my love for you.’” “In The Moment” “At first, I didn’t want to show Ari this song. But he heard it and said, ‘Why would you do that to me? Don’t ever hide songs from me again. This is a bop!’ As adults, we all have our vices, and making bad decisions under the influence is a very universal experience. I would like to say that I’ve never made a bad decision under the influence, but that would be a bold-faced lie.” “Evil Eye (Extended)” “On ‘The Weekend’ [from 2017’s Ctrl], SZA comes in on these drums, singing on the outro. I’ve never really thought about putting [a similar section] in my music, until this song. I made a song called ‘Hard Feelings,’ which Ari flipped and placed at the end of this song. But he made it Afro, and Jay Warner, who produced the ‘Hard Feelings’ song, also has a little vamp on there. ‘Evil Eye’ is such a perfect, amazing song in itself. So, it was nice to play around with adding something else.” “Stuck” “I believe a lot of our aunties, uncles, and parents were in relationships purely for convenience, like, ‘This is just our life now.’ And leaving to explore different options seemed so absurd. Singleness is so off-putting that they’ll avoid it, even if it means being unhappy. There’s loads of traditional ways of thinking that we conflate with love, but love is actually multifaceted and layered—I don’t think enough people are experiencing it, though many are experiencing companionship.” “Always Something” “This is my list of complaints. If life had a HR [department], I would send this to them, and hopefully they would do something. I wanted this as a closer to the project. As we’ve gone into different aspects of adulthood, you’ve been whisked away in beautiful music and melody, but let’s get back to what we really came here to talk about: life, it’s hard, and there’s always something.” “Stay (Acoustic)” “I feel like you get to understand the sentiment [of a song] more when you perform it acoustically with the production stripped back. You get to hear the lyrics and get into the vocals a whole lot more. So, I was asking around for a good pop song to cover here and decided on ‘Stay' by Justin Bieber and The Kid LAROI. It fits perfectly with the theme of Adultsville and just how I feel on relationships and love in general.” “Prototype (Acoustic)” “I loved putting an acoustic spin on this track, which sounds so dope. It feels even more intimate, like you’re sitting down with the artist, just listening.” “In The Moment (Acoustic)” “This track is special to me, as it feels acoustic but also like an alternate version. There’s this halftime vibe to it that reminds me of ‘Jungle’ by Drake—which makes sense, as I listened to lots of SZA, Frank Ocean, and Drake to inspire me across this project.”