The Singles Jukebox

But really, who is this mysterious producer?

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[5.17]

Will Adams: Adele singing on a Shellback/Max Martin song didn’t make sense six months ago, and it doesn’t make sense now.
[5]

Thomas Inskeep: Adele + Max Martin = acoustic guitar + click track + clichéd lyrics, and makes the oldest-sounding 20-something popstar around sound like a 40-something who’s trying far too hard. And except for the age piece, she is.
[3]

Hannah Jocelyn: “Send My Love” is one of the more laid-back songs on 25, which means it should stick out considering the overblown nature of everything else on that album. It’s interesting that Max Martin worked on this, as aside from the intentional “I Knew You Were Trouble” homage, few of his fingerprints are on here. Nonetheless, on paper, it should make for a perfect summer jam, which is probably the motive behind releasing it now. But mixing engineer Serban Ghenea makes this so laid-back and flat that nothing connects. All the elements for something great are present, but they never mix; not the guitar strums, not Adele’s campy vocal performance, and certainly not the unmemorable words. The failure to click is especially baffling when Serban’s other job on 25, “Water Under The Bridge”, is the biggest, lushest-sounding, and just outright best song on the album.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: I find that listening to this song is not nearly as enjoyable as reading its Wikipedia article, particularly the parts that list Max Martin and Shellback as producers. Try to forget what a Max Martin-produced Adele song actually sounds like in our universe, and imagine the array of possibilities for what it could sound like. If you find it impossible to imagine anything that sounds substantially different than an Edward Sharpe remix of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” then congratulations, this world has defeated you.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: Between the chords and the theme, I can’t stop hearing “Lori Glory” with none of the girl-crush subtext. That would be too complicated for this, though. Max Martin, Shellback and Adele isn’t a collaboration, it’s a calculus optimization problem for profits, and like most word problems it doesn’t quite translate right into the real world, where the result sounds like the terrifying spawn of Taylor Swift and Jack Johnson. (Even more terrifying: imagine that, but literal.) Did anybody, anywhere, listen to Adele for her potential to become this? “We ain’t kids no more,” Adele sings; they may be the only two remaining people on Earth that ain’t. Definitely in the music industry.
[5]

Alfred Soto: “You know we ain’t kids no more” is the most important line: a signal to Adele’s demographic, an insistence that pop music needn’t accommodate to the Snapchat crowd. Hiring Shellback and Max Martin for help adduces Adele’s determination to bend pop her way. On “Send My Love,” though, her multitracked chorus vocal reduces the sentiment to rubble. It’s too much. Good hook though. If Jessie Ware or Laura Mvula had American pop ambitions, here’s the tune.
[6]

Brad Shoup: The title is winkingly archaic; the guitar pops and locks; Adele shakes her shoulders. There are parallel universes where Michael Hedges is alive and pairs this with “A Love Bizarre” in concert.
[6]

Natasha Genet Avery: “Just the guitar, please,” Adele says: a signal to the audience that the ensuing song will be #raw. She ushers in a muted guitar and kick drum, which promises a cathartic release that never fully materializes. Over two chords alternating ad nauseum, Adele spins a familiar tale: the broken promise of an everlasting love, the abstracted new flame as a reminder of everything that could have been. I’ll accept the narrative, though I’m bored by it: in addition to being lyrically lazy, the sentiment “send my love to your new lover” is Adele at her most self-pitying. But all that aside, the slapdash assembly of this whole song is best demonstrated by the fact that the phrase “hot heat” has now made it onto the international airwaves. 
[5]

Katie Gill: Look, it’s an Adele song so it’s going to be about relationship and heartbreak. It’s going to have sparse instrumentation because Adele’s voice is the highlight of the show. And we’re all going to love it because she won all those awards for a reason and she has the voice of an angel.
[7]

Anthony Easton: I don’t believe a word of this, but I don’t think we are supposed to, and the catch before she starts singing “treat her better” is more subtle and better contained than any of her over-arching heartbreak. The guitar that has a percussive edge, close to calypso, is also really interesting.  
[8]

Cassy Gress: This wasn’t written for Shakira, but you could have fooled me. Her voice floats over “send my love to your new lo-o-ver” while that faintly saw-wave bass and drums chug along agreeably, but for being a “happy you’re gone” song, she doesn’t sound particularly happy, or even angry or sad. She’s just there. 
[4]

Mo Kim: Try as she might, the only thing Adele manages to register is that three-note delivery on “luh-uh-ver” in the chorus, a whimsical hook she delivers as if she’s trying not to draw blood. Maybe that’s the problem with the rest of it: I’m afraid it’s just too darn polite.
[5]