Where did they go?
“Hello from the other side.”
They sold out stadiums, broke streaming records, and had fans sleeping outside venues for days. Then — almost nothing. Whatever happened to the singers who ruled the world alongside Adele?
There was a moment in the early 2010s when the charts felt genuinely stacked. Adele was crying into a microphone and breaking every sales record in existence. But she wasn’t alone. Flanking her were a handful of artists who felt just as permanent, just as inevitable — voices that seemed carved into the culture. Then something happened. Or rather, something stopped happening.
This isn’t about Adele, who has kept releasing music on her own glacial and magnificent schedule. This is about the others. The ones whose names still live rent-free in our heads but whose discographies quietly froze in place.
“Their fans didn’t leave. The artists did — or something in the machine did it for them.”
Sam Smith
Peak era: 2014–2015
Sam Smith arrived fully formed with In the Lonely Hour, a debut so devastatingly sad it felt like a public therapy session. Grammys followed. A Bond theme followed. Fans were completely obsessed. Since then, Smith has released music sporadically — pivoting toward dance collaborations and a reinvented identity — but nothing has recaptured the raw, room-silencing power of that first moment. It’s not that they disappeared. It’s that the music stopped feeling essential.
Lorde
Peak era: 2013–2017
At 16, Ella Yelich-O’Connor wrote Royals and made everyone feel vaguely embarrassed about liking normal pop songs. Melodrama in 2017 was hailed as a generational masterpiece. Then came years of silence, punctuated by a 2021 album that didn’t land the way fans had hoped. Lorde has always operated on her own timeline — deliberately, defiantly unhurried. But the silence between records has grown so large it has its own personality at this point.
Gotye
Peak era: 2011–2012
Few songs have ever dominated the cultural conversation the way Somebody That I Used to Know did. It was inescapable — radio, commercials, every open-mic night on the planet. Wally De Backer’s follow-up was… nothing. He has said openly that the scale of that success was alienating, and that music-making returned to being a private joy rather than a public offering. He’s been making music in small, uncommercial ways ever since. The world just isn’t invited.
So — why does this keep happening?
It would be easy to blame the streaming era, which is brutal to artists whose fans expect constant content rather than carefully crafted albums years apart. It would be easy to blame the industry, which drops artists who don’t deliver immediate commercial returns. Both things are true. But they’re also incomplete.
Some of these artists clearly needed to stop. The pressure that comes with overnight, planet-scale fame is genuinely extraordinary, and plenty of people who haven’t been through it underestimate its weight. Gotye said as much. Duffy said as much. Lorde’s unhurried pace suggests she knows something about protecting herself that more commercially driven artists don’t.
“The songs are still there. The fans are still there. Whether the next album is — that’s anybody’s guess.”
What’s interesting is that the fanbases haven’t really dissipated. Reddit threads still speculate. Old concert footage still racks up millions of views. The hunger is there. It’s just going unfed, sometimes for years at a stretch.
Perhaps the most honest answer is that the music industry of the early 2010s created a specific kind of artist — intensely personal, emotionally exposed, often debut-album-as-autobiography — and then expected those same artists to do it all over again, on demand, forever. That was always an unreasonable ask. The wonder isn’t that so many of them stepped back. It’s that any of them managed to keep going at all.