In 2023, Adéla entered The Debut: Dream Academy hoping to earn a place in HYBE and Geffen Records’ new global girl group. Instead, the Slovak singer and dancer became the first contestant eliminated from the competition. Six other women would eventually make the cut, becoming Daniela, Lara, Manon, Megan, Sophia and Yoonchae of KATSEYE.
Three years later, KATSEYE is one of pop’s biggest new girl groups. But Adéla isn’t doing too badly either.
Since leaving Dream Academy, she has steadily carved out a solo identity of her own, releasing music independently before signing with Capitol Records. It’s a trajectory that makes her early elimination particularly interesting to revisit now. Adéla may not have won Dream Academy, but she is beginning to win outside of it — and her rise is another reminder that there has never been just one way to make a pop star.
Losing the competition doesn’t mean losing the career
Talent competitions have always made stardom feel deceptively straightforward. Someone auditions, survives each round and, if everything goes to plan, emerges at the other end with a career. Yet some of pop’s most successful artists have spent decades proving that the equation isn’t quite so simple. Jennifer Hudson finished seventh on American Idol. The members of One Direction entered The X Factor as solo contestants, were assembled into a group and still only finished third. The competition can end long before the career does.
Chappell Roan offers an even more interesting comparison to Adéla. Long before the pink cowboy hats, drag-inspired performances and theatrical world that would eventually make her one of pop’s most distinctive stars, Roan unsuccessfully auditioned for America’s Got Talent and The Voice as a teenager.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to look at those rejections and wonder how anyone failed to spot what was there. But that assumes the Chappell Roan we know today was already standing in the audition room.
She wasn’t.
The voice was there, but much of what would eventually make Chappell Roan Chappell Roan came later. Her appeal isn’t only technical ability. It is the specificity of the entire package — the music, visuals, performance, humour, camp and point of view working together to create an artist who feels immediately recognisable.
That is much harder for a talent competition to measure. An audition can tell you who can sing. A competition can test who performs well under pressure or who works within a particular format. Neither can reliably predict who someone might become after another five or ten years of figuring themselves out.
Adéla is obviously at a much earlier stage in that journey, but her post-Dream Academy career is compelling for a similar reason. Once KATSEYE was no longer the destination, she had to work out what an Adéla solo career actually looked like.
That freedom matters. Dream Academy was ultimately trying to build a group, which meant finding six performers whose individual identities could coexist as one act. Adéla’s solo career has no such requirement. Her music, visuals and performances can be built entirely around her. Instead of asking how she fits into something, she gets to make herself the thing people have to understand.
None of this means losing a talent competition is somehow preferable to winning one. For every Jennifer Hudson or Chappell Roan, there are countless rejected contestants whose careers never take off. Success has a way of rewriting failure into foreshadowing, making every old rejection look like an inevitable chapter in an origin story once we already know how it ends.
Adéla’s story is interesting precisely because her ending hasn’t been written yet. What has changed is the number of routes available to her.
There isn’t one way to make a pop star anymore
Twenty years ago, a major television competition could represent one of an aspiring artist’s clearest shots at reaching a mass audience. Today, TikTok, YouTube and streaming have complicated that pipeline. An artist doesn’t necessarily need to wait for a competition, label or executive to decide they are marketable before finding people willing to listen. They can release music, experiment with an identity and build an audience while the industry watches.
That doesn’t make traditional star-making obsolete. KATSEYE is compelling evidence of the opposite. The group is the product of an enormous amount of scouting, training, development and investment, and its success shows just how powerful that machinery can still be when it works.
Adéla simply shows that it isn’t the only machinery available.
In fact, her own journey still intersects heavily with the traditional industry. Dream Academy gave her professional training and exposure, while Pop Star Academy later introduced the contestants and their stories to an even wider audience. Her solo work allowed her to establish herself outside the group, but her eventual signing to Capitol brought a major label back into the equation.
She didn’t escape the pop machine so much as find another way through it.
That is what makes Adéla and KATSEYE interesting to look at together. One followed the route Dream Academy was specifically created to build. The other left that route early and began constructing one of her own. Both still rely on talent, identity, industry support and, ultimately, an audience deciding that they care.
KATSEYE didn’t need Adéla to become KATSEYE. And increasingly, it looks like Adéla didn’t need to become KATSEYE to become Adéla.
She didn’t make the group. But maybe she didn’t need to.