Adam Lambert Is In His Industrial Era With New Single “EAT U ALIVE” And Sixth Album “ADAM”
Adam Lambert has announced his sixth studio album, Adam, due 10 July 2026 via his own label, alongside lead single Eat U Alive and a dramatic Nick Knight album cover that has the internet doing a full reappraisal. The 12-track record is the singer’s first set of original songs since 2020’s Velvet and his first new release of any kind since 2023’s covers project High Drama.
That cover, though
Shot by British fashion photographer Nick Knight, the Adam artwork paints Lambert in cracked stone and brushed metal, somewhere between a Soviet-era hero statue and Fritz Lang’s 1927 German expressionist science-fiction classic, Metropolis. Lambert told Variety the look is deliberate. “It’s a little bit of metal, a little bit of stone,” he said. “Some of the stone is kind of cracked or chipped or distressed. It wasn’t built yesterday. And neither was I.” For a queer artist who has spent 17 years in the public eye, the armour reads as both protection and provocation.
What does “Eat U Alive” sound like?
The single is a hungry, vampire-coded thing of a song. Lambert calls it “basically a rock song with electronic production”, and the reference points he is naming sit between Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine and a dark corner of a Berlin club in 2002: Björk, Prince, Muse, Goldfrapp, Daft Punk, Massive Attack and The Crystal Method. “Eat U Alive is the perfect primer into my next musical chapter,” Lambert said in the announcement.
What is “Adam” actually about?
Twelve tracks, executive produced by Pete Nappi, split into what Lambert calls a two-act structure. One side leans dark and metallic. The other lifts into dreamy, hopeful territory. “The album explores both the light and shade of life and the razor’s edge that separates a positive experience from a negative one,” Lambert said in a statement. It is also a New York record, written after he sold his Los Angeles house mid-run of his Broadway turn in Cabaret and moved to the Lower East Side. The opening track, he told Variety, is a love letter to downtown Manhattan.
Will there be a tour?
He is keen but cagey. “Hopefully. I mean, I want to see how people like it first,” Lambert told Variety. After playing Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hollywood Bowl opposite Cynthia Erivo and the Emcee in Broadway’s Cabaret, the appetite for a live moment is clearly there.
Why we are paying attention
At DNA we have watched Lambert do glam-rock, ’70s-leaning funk, a covers detour and a season of musical theatre, but the Adam rollout reads as his most honest version yet. He is leaning into the cracks, not glossing them. Eat U Alive is streaming on all platforms now. Adam is available to pre-order, with 10 July the date to circle.
