A song can live with you for years — rewritten, re-recorded, performed on stages across two countries — and still not feel finished. It can wait a decade for its final form. For Adey, a Toronto-based Ethiopian singer who has been making music for nearly twenty years, that patience has defined an entire career.
She has performed from Toronto to Addis Ababa. She has opened for Julian Marley in Ethiopia. Her recording catalog stretches back to the early 2010s. And yet, at thirty-eight, she is only now preparing to release her debut album: a record called Unorthodox.
The question is not why she took so long. It is what kind of artist emerges from that refusal to rush.
The Cost of Caring Too Much
Adey was born in Vancouver and raised in Toronto from age eleven, growing up closely connected to her Ethiopian heritage. Music, she has said, was the thing that mattered most — and precisely because it mattered, she held it close, reworking songs through version after version rather than letting them go.
That gap between how long she has been making music and how little of it she has formally released sits at the center of Unorthodox. The album arrives after what Adey has described as a years-long push and pull between protecting the work and putting it out, between wanting everything right and simply wanting to be heard.
Over the last six or seven years, Adey has spent increasingly long stretches in Ethiopia, building community and artistic connections there. She considers the network of artists she has formed family. Her music has been shaped by that dual grounding — the independence of the Toronto diaspora and the gravitational pull of Ethiopian heritage.
Holy Water and "The Dress"
If any single song captures how deeply personal Adey's creative process is, it is "The Dress."
During the rainy season of 2019, while in Ethiopia, Adey underwent five days of tsebel at her mother's request — a healing ritual involving holy water and prayer, in which cold water is poured over the body as a priest prays. The experience was emotionally intense. She began writing down the thoughts and emotions that surfaced during those days, and the words eventually became music.
The song followed her through multiple iterations over the next several years. Earlier in 2026, Adey released The Dress as an EP containing multiple versions of the track. Rather than erasing the distance between first draft and finished recording, she put the evolution itself on the record — letting listeners hear how a song born from spiritual crisis found its shape over time.
The choice is revealing. Many artists would pick the best version and bury the rest. Adey chose to show her work, treating revision not as a flaw to hide but as an essential part of the art.
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What "Unorthodox" Means
Adey has been drawn to the album's title for years. In one sense, the word simply means existing outside tradition or the norm — an apt description of a career built on no one else's timeline. But she is aware the word carries a different charge in Ethiopia, a country where the Orthodox Christian faith holds deep cultural weight and where her own family practices the faith. The prefix "un" before "Orthodox," combined with who she is and how she presents herself, registers with a deliberate edge.
That tension — between breaking from tradition and belonging to it — runs quietly through the project. Adey is not rejecting her heritage. She is insisting on her own relationship to it, one shaped as much by Toronto basements and recording sessions as by holy water in the Ethiopian highlands.
The Diaspora Timeline
Adey's story is worth sitting with because it challenges the way we typically narrate artistic careers. The music industry favors the young debut, the viral moment, the algorithm-friendly release schedule. A twenty-year path to a first album looks, by those standards, like failure — or at least like something that needs explaining.
But diaspora creative lives often follow different arcs. Artists working between countries, between languages, between audiences that do not always overlap, rarely have the luxury of a single linear trajectory. They build in fragments. They release a single here, perform there, spend years refining material that straddles two worlds. The album, when it finally arrives, is not a beginning. It is an accumulation.
Adey's catalog of singles and recordings from the early 2010s onward constitutes a body of work in itself — one that existed largely outside the formal structures of albums and streaming platforms. Unorthodox gathers some of that scattered history into a single statement, combining newer material with songs she has carried and rebuilt over the years.
Letting Go
There is something fitting about an artist who spent nearly two decades refining her music choosing to preserve the rough edges — to release an EP that is essentially a document of creative process, and to name her debut album after a word that embraces being outside the norm.
The perfection Adey has been searching for may not be a flawless recording. It may be getting the music to a place where it feels enough like her that she can finally stop working on it.
And even now, the work does not stop. Adey has signaled there is more material waiting — years of songs she still wants to release. But first, after nearly two decades of making, remaking, and holding on, she has to let this one go.
Unorthodox is not a late debut. It is a first offering from an artist who has been present the entire time — performing, recording, returning to songs that were never quite done. The word "first" does not mean early. It means: finally ready.
