Adéla Ain't in LA

Oftentimes (and particularly in this era), predicting what song is going to “take” with the masses in a major way is like a game of roulette. And nothing has felt less predictable than the fact that, of all the songs Adéla has released thus far, “Ain’t in LA” is her biggest hit. To the point where even Nicole Kidman is a self-proclaimed stan—which is fortunate for Adéla, considering she has a song on Prima called “Nicole Kidman.” Herself a symbol of what Hollywood glamor means to those in and out of L.A. Indeed, Kidman has been branded as “one of our last truly legendary movie stars” by none other than fellow Adéla enthusiast Charli XCX. Yet Kidman, too, ain’t from L.A.

All of this serving to emphasize Adéla’s overarching point that what makes L.A. the world capital of “bad bitches” are the transplants and immigrants who flock there with the ambition to “be somebody.” Something that even “all-American” icon Miley Cyrus expresses on a song like 2009’s “Party in the USA,” during which she admits to her insecurities upon first touching down in the City of Angels (and Devils) with the opening verse, “I hopped off the plane at LAX/With a dream and my cardigan/Welcome to the land of fame excess/Am I gonna fit in?/Jumped in the cab, here I am for the first time/Look to my right, and I see the Hollywood sign/This is all so crazy/Everybody seems so famous.”

And, speaking of Cyrus, apart from Adéla being inspired to become a pop star because of Hannah Montana, if one happens to notice that the warped voice at the beginning sounds like the intro to “We Can’t Stop” (“It’s our party, we can do what we want”)—or the part of the Skrillex remix of Birdy Nam Nam’s “Goin’ In” that announces, “I’m goin’ wild for the night/Fuck bein’ polite”—it’s because Theron Thomas is the one speaking in both. So yeah, talk about Adéla having some clout already to lock that kind of iconic vocal down. Just as she Fred Gervais-directed video reveals her clout even when she was a “no-frills” girl with nothing but a dream (so, naturally, no money). One that meant she wanted to get out of her small, limiting town if she ever wanted to hit the big time. Or at least, that’s what she and so many others with her dream have been conditioned to believe, addressing as much with the line, “And she’s taught that/Her dreams don’t live at home.”

Thus, as if to defy that notion, Adéla purposefully chose to have the video for “Ain’t in LA” filmed in her hometown of Bratislava, Slovakia. Which is not unlike Chappell Roan choosing to film the video for “Hot to Go!” in her hometown of Springfield, Missouri (though more specifically, her hometown is Willard). Except the difference is that Adéla will probably never endure the risk of being called a privileged rich girl later down the line in her career, with little doubt about her modest beginnings. Ones that had no benefit of attending a three-thousand-dollar-a-week Grammy camp.

Elsewhere in the video, Adéla mounts a pole in what looks like a combination abandoned strip club/bathhouse, hangs out in what appears to be her childhood bedroom, rides her bike around with friends and sticks her head out of a car window Beyoncé -style in the “Formation” video. All of which is to say, she exudes her general fabulousness in “humble,” “down-home” ways that don’t require the glitz of an L.A. backdrop (though, mind you, there are many parts of L.A. that could easily pass for Bratislava).

At the same time, L.A., no matter how one tries to escape its influence (hear also: “Californication”), is a veritable “dream factory” that disseminates its imagery throughout the globe, as emphasized during a scene of Adéla (joined by some kids in their “country-of-origin-centric” attire) dancing before a storefront that has the image of the Hollywood sign on it. This speaking to one of the inspirations for the song, which were some pictures of her mother that she found from “back in the day.” Pictures that showed her posing in front of a wall with Western capitalist pop culture shit. Per Adéla, “My grandfather smuggled the posters in from Germany. It made me think, ‘There are so many beautiful girls with dreams who will never get their flowers like my mom.’ I wrote this for her and the billion other bitches who are probably cooler than me.”

Some of those other bitches Adéla seems to think are cooler than her include Madonna and the women of Destiny’s Child, referenced in the verse, “She shares a room with her younger brother/Clothes secondhand from her best friend’s mother/Cut ‘em all up, yeah, she got her own style/Madonna on the wall next to Destiny’s Child.” The specific selection of these musicians as “totems” for a Central European trying to make it out also subtly reveal the fact that Western pop culture in places such as these is always just a little bit behind. Even despite the present-day instantaneousness invoked by the internet.

Nonetheless, Adéla’s “gritty” but playful tone is aimed at reminding the girls who don’t live in L.A. that their aspirations aren’t out of reach just because of their “station in life.” Which is to say, not living in L.A. Instead forced to romanticize it. Or rather, what it represents: glamor, success and “making it” in “the industry.” Just as Adéla has. In fact, she moved to L.A. in 2022 with the intention to become, well, famous. Initially, she studied music at Santa Monica College, eventually securing a record deal with Capitol (much to Sky Ferreira’s probable dismay), the sister label of Polydor (though both are owned by Universal Music Group). Then, of course, there was her stint on Dream Academy in 2023, a time she doesn’t look back on with much fondness.

Yet it all seemed to be a part of the grind she was on to make her dream of becoming a musician come true, no matter what it took. To that point, Adéla tellingly said to Clash magazine in an interview from August of 2026, “It’s tough to make it out of Slovakia, in a pop music sense. I had to scheme my way through and find my way into rooms. I’m glad for all the lessons that I’ve learned through that. No one works as hard as an immigrant; no one works as hard as somebody who doesn’t feel at home. They have something to prove. I get to use that to my benefit.”

And it was upon arriving in L.A. that she started to notice, as she mentioned at one of her performances in May of 2026, “…L.A. is what it is because of all the immigrants, just like myself, and all the transplants from all the other states too in the U.S.” In short, the people she deems to be the true “baddest bitches” are the ones that can never be “homegrown” in the city itself, but have to be “imported” instead. Thus, she defiantly declares in the chorus, “Maybe tonight, we don’t gotta run away/It’s all a lie, the baddest bitches ain’t in L.A./Enjoy the ride, I know that you might wanna escape/It’s all a lie, the baddest bitches ain’t in L.A.”

Yet despite this assertion, the irony is that, of course, all the baddest bitches—by Adéla’s definition—do end up in L.A. Even the ones that tried to start out in New York (and side note: the baddest bitches definitely ain’t in New York…unless one is using the conventional meaning of the word “bad”). Because, one way or another, the city will pull you in if you want to be a part of the entertainment business in a “mainstream” kind of way. To boot, Adéla even remarked during that abovementioned performance, “I really love living in L.A. I actually think it’s a really great place, and I have amazing friends here and a home here.”

So one supposes, in its own off-kilter manner, “Ain’t in LA” is complimentary to the city it insults. Because she still cites it as the benchmark even as she insists that “charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent” (a.k.a. what RuPaul’s Drag Race calls “C.U.N.T.”) exist in so many other places. Regardless, the baddest bitches keep flocking to L.A. even if they ain’t in it to begin with. Such is the “like a moth to a flame” power it continues to have. And besides, to quote Beyoncé, “You know you that bitch when you cause all this conversation.”