Discover: Adey’s Debut Has Been 20 Years in the Making

Adey has been making music for almost 20 years. She has just never released an album.

That does not mean the Toronto-based Ethiopian singer has been waiting quietly in the wings. Since she began recording seriously in her early twenties, Adey has released music, performed on stages from Toronto to Addis Ababa, and even opened for Julian Marley in Ethiopia. Her catalog stretches back to the early 2010s, with some songs following her for more than a decade.

Yet at 38, she is only now preparing to release Unorthodox, her 10-track debut album, in September.

Part of that delay comes from how deeply she has always felt about music. “There's nothing else that gives me that feeling,” she tells OkayAfrica. “It's just an unexplainable joy.”

Perhaps because it mattered so much, she guarded it closely.

“Anything connected with my name, like I want to be good,” she says. “I was always so concerned about it being perfect, or being exactly the way I envisioned it.”

That gap between how long Adey has been making music and how much of herself she has been willing to put out there sits at the center of Unorthodox. The album arrives after a years-long push and pull between protecting the work and releasing it, between wanting everything exactly right and wanting to be heard. Perfectionism played a role, she admits, but so did family expectations and the vulnerability of being fully seen.

“I had to build up a strength,” she says, “to get to this point, to be ready to deal with whatever may come with being visible and being seen.”

After nearly two decades of making music, Unorthodox feels less like a first step than a long-delayed exhale.

Songs With Many Lives

That absence of an album should not be mistaken for inactivity.

Adey has spent those years constantly recording, releasing some songs and letting others sit until she felt ready to return to them. Her latest single, “Sandman,” is one of the clearest examples of how long some of those songs have stayed with her.

Built around the instantly recognizable melody of Pat Ballard’s 1954 standard “Mr. Sandman,” Adey first recorded the song in 2011 after freestyling several versions over the same beat and eventually stitching together the parts she loved. She released it in 2016 as her first-ever song. It was played on the radio in Toronto and became a favorite at her live shows, but she held off on putting it on streaming platforms at the time.

More than a decade after that first recording, she has returned to it, re-recording and slowing it down for Unorthodox.

“That's been a song that I've performed over the years,” she says. “People always request that one…[so] we re-recorded it for a new production. Kind of slowed it down a bit and turned it more into a vibe.”

Five Versions of “The Dress”

That habit of returning and refining is perhaps clearest with “The Dress.”

Born in Vancouver and raised in Toronto from age 11, Adey grew up closely connected to her Ethiopian heritage. Over the last six or seven years, she has spent increasingly long stretches in Ethiopia, connecting with other artists and building a community she now considers family.

It was there, during the rainy season in 2019, that she wrote “The Dress.” At her mother’s request, Adey underwent five days of tsebel – a healing ritual involving holy water and prayer, where cold water is poured over you as a priest prays.

“I was going through a lot of emotions and thoughts during that time,” she says. Her mother told her to “pray, ask for forgiveness.” That line became the song's opening lyric as she started writing those thoughts down, not initially intending to turn them into music.

Earlier this year, Adey released The Dress as an EP containing five iterations of the song. The tracklist reads like a creative timeline. It includes a demo dated October 2019, a “new dress” from November, and three versions from 2025, including one labeled “hybrid.” Instead of erasing the years between first draft and finished recording, Adey put the evolution itself on the record.

“I just wanted people to see the process and the evolution of the song.”

The dress carries another meaning too. Adey says she was never a girl who liked dresses. They were tied to a version of femininity and tradition she never quite saw herself in. 

“Ultimately, that was never me,” she says. “Just because I don’t like to wear dresses, it makes me less of a girl?”

Letting Unorthodox Go

That tension sits naturally within the album, Unorthodox.

Adey has had the title in mind for years, drawn to the word’s meaning of existing outside tradition or the norm. She is also aware of how differently it might register in Ethiopia.

“Ethiopia [is] a country that is majority led by Orthodox Christian faith, and my family's Orthodox as well,” she says. “What people are gonna see is just the word ‘un’ before Orthodox, and then the woman that I am, present[ing] the way I do… it might look a certain way.”

Adey finished recording the 10 tracks roughly two years ago, bringing together newer material with songs from different periods of her life that she has revisited and rebuilt. “The Dress” became what she calls its “heart and soul.”

“I appreciate rawness,” she says. “I like mistakes and stuff on the records. I just like the rawness more than something that’s so squeaky clean.”

Perhaps that contradiction explains something about the long road to Unorthodox. The perfection Adey has been searching for is not necessarily a flawless recording. It is getting the music to a place where it feels enough like her that she can finally stop working on it.

And there is already more waiting; she drops it. She already has another album concept, more EPs and years of songs she still wants to release. But first, after nearly two decades of making, remaking and holding onto music, she has to get this one out of her hands.

“It's a collection of older songs and some new songs,” Adey says. “It's the first offering, anyways.”