Hello

Hello was written in Chiswick, London, by Adele and Greg Kurstin, who also produced it. It took six months to write. It was recorded at Metropolis Studios in London. Kurstin plays bass, guitar, drums, piano and keyboards, and Adele plays drums.

She told Nick Grimshaw on BBC Radio 1 that it was not about an ex but about her relationship with everyone she loves. She said the line about the other side meant the other side of becoming an adult, of getting out of her late teens and early twenties alive. A 30-second clip of it ran in an X Factor ad break on 18 October 2015, and the single was released on 23 October. The Guardian's Alexis Petridis called it a big ballad, but a superior example of its kind, and wrote that it could have been on 21.

The video, directed by Xavier Dolan with Tristan Wilds, was filmed on a farm in Quebec in September 2015, partly with IMAX cameras. It had 27.7 million views in its first 24 hours and reached one billion in 87 days. The song entered at number one in the UK with 333,000 combined sales, and in the United States it opened with 1,112,000 downloads, the first song to sell more than a million in a week, and stayed at number one for ten weeks. At the 59th Grammys it won Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance. It appears in 250 of the 435 logged setlists that list songs.