5 Things to Know About Adele’s New Album

The return of Adele is a big deal—few artists move as many albums as she does. Her last album, 21, spawned three Billboard No. 1 singles and sold more than 10 million copies in the U.S. alone. (It also inspired this infamous Saturday Night Live skit starring Emma Stone.) Now, Adele just might do it again when she comes back this fall with her long-awaited follow-up, which the now-27-year-old just confirmed in a note to fans will be called 25 (named for her age when she wrote it). Here’s the low-down on the album, which she just announced is coming out November 20:

It’s not a break-up album
Some of Adele’s biggest hits—like “Rolling in the Deep” and “Someone Like You”—deal with failed relationships. The new album will take a different approach. “My last record was a break-up record and if I had to label this one I would call it a make-up record,” she wrote on Twitter on Wednesday. “I’m making up with myself. Making up for lost time. Making up for everything I ever did and never did…25 is about getting to know who I’ve become without realising.”

It has some top-notch collaborators
When you’re an artist as successful as Adele, you get to pick from the cream of the crop. The list of people who have worked on the album includes names like Max Martin (who’s produced 21 No. 1 singles, most recently for Taylor Swift and the Weeknd), Tobias Jesso Jr. (who made TIME’s best-of-2015-so-far list), Danger Mouse (who was one half of Gnarls Barkley) and Sia. Mark Ronson of “Uptown Funk” fame also strongly hinted that he worked on new music with the singer.

It’s very good…depending on whom you ask
Over the summer Ed Sheeran told Capital FM that while he hadn’t heard the Adele record personally, second-hand knowledge suggested great things are in store. “Everyone I know who’ve worked on it is just like, ‘Dude… that record!’ Apparently, it’s really good.” But tell that to Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz), who said the material Adele and Danger Mouse worked on was “very middle of the road.” (Albarn also worked with the singer, but seemed unsure of whether the fruits of their sessions would ever see the light of day.)

There’s a lot on the cutting room floor
Sia is one of pop’s most in-demand songwriters—in recent years she’s written for Beyoncé, Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, Kylie Minogue and Carly Rae Jepsen. You’d think, then, that nobody would let a Sia song go to waste, but the enigmatic pop star says Adele passed on music she worked on for the album. One of those songs, “Alive,” which Adele and Tobias Jesso Jr. co-wrote with her, was just released by Sia herself as the first song from This Is Acting, an upcoming album of songs Sia originally intended for other artists. (And don’t worry, Sia believes she has a song that did make the cut for Adele’s album—after Rihanna passed on it.) If “Alive” is the kind of song that’s not right for an Adele album, imagine how many other songs must be sitting around on a hard drive somewhere.

You can already hear some of it
Over the weekend, fans got the first taste of new Adele music in a mysterious TV spot that aired during X Factor in the U.K. OneRepublic, whose frontman Ryan Tedder worked with Adele on her last album and returned for 25, confirmed it was really her in a tweet, suggesting that the track may be yet another addition to the Adele-Tedder canon alongside “Rumour Has It” and “Turning Tables.”