Crate Digging With Adi: 10 Records That Rewired Her Creative DNA

There's a version of every artist that exists before the world ever hears them — a version shaped entirely by what they've listened to in the dark, alone, headphones on, completely undone by a chord change or a lyric they didn't see coming. For Adi Ulmansky, that interior world is rich, restless, and wildly eclectic. She's never been the kind of artist who stays in one lane, and when you trace her playlist back to its roots, that makes total sense.

We sat down with Adi to talk about the records that left permanent marks on her. Not just songs she likes — songs that changed something. The kind of tracks that made her pick up an instrument differently, write a lyric more honestly, or rethink what a song is even allowed to do. What came out of that conversation is the list below: ten essential touchstones, each one a window into the artist she's become.

1. PJ Harvey — "Down by the Water"

Adi doesn't mince words about this one: "PJ Harvey taught me that a woman's voice doesn't have to be pretty to be powerful." The rawness of To Bring You My Love hit her during a formative stretch when she was trying to figure out how to hold vulnerability and menace in the same breath. Harvey's willingness to be unsettling, to be ugly in the most beautiful way — that permission stuck.

2. Radiohead — "Karma Police"

She came to Radiohead the way a lot of people do: through OK Computer, late at night, not quite ready for what it would do to her. "That album made me understand that pop music and existential dread aren't opposites," she says. The way Thom Yorke wraps creeping anxiety inside a melody you can hum — that tension between accessibility and depth became a north star.

3. Nina Simone — "Feeling Good"

This one is about delivery. Adi has talked in interviews about the way Nina Simone treats a lyric not as a line to be sung but as a truth to be testified. "She doesn't perform the song — she is the song," Adi says. That distinction, between performing and embodying, became central to how she approaches her own vocals.

4. Portishead — "Glory Box"

Trip-hop was a revelation. The way Portishead layered cinematic atmosphere with raw emotion — that combination of cool and aching — is something you can hear echoed in Adi's production sensibility. "I wanted to make music that felt like a film score and a breakup at the same time," she's said. Beth Gibbons showed her that was possible.

5. Björk — "Human Behaviour"

If there's one artist who gave Adi full license to be strange, it's Björk. Not strange for the sake of it — strange because the emotion demands it. "Björk never apologizes for the weirdness," Adi says. "She treats it like the most natural thing in the world, and somehow that makes you believe it is." The fearlessness of Debut remains a touchstone for pushing past the conventional.

Photo: Björk, via travelground.imgix.net

6. Jeff Buckley — "Lover, You Should've Come Over"

This track is about longing so acute it becomes physical. Adi cites Buckley's vocal range — not just technically, but emotionally — as something that rewired her understanding of what a singer can do with space and restraint. "He knew when to hold back and when to let everything go," she says. "That instinct is everything."

7. Massive Attack — "Teardrop"

Another trip-hop cornerstone, but for different reasons than Portishead. "Teardrop" taught her about texture — the way a heartbeat bassline and a fragile vocal can create something that feels both vast and intimate. Adi has described her own production process as "building rooms for emotions to live in," and you can trace that architectural thinking directly back to Massive Attack.

8. Fiona Apple — "Criminal"

Fiona Apple is all over Adi's DNA, and "Criminal" is where it started. The confessional directness, the refusal to make herself sympathetic in easy ways, the piano that feels like it's barely holding itself together — it modeled a kind of artistic honesty that doesn't ask for the audience's approval. "She writes like she has nothing to lose," Adi says. "I've been chasing that feeling ever since."

9. The Knife — "Heartbeats"

Electronic music entered the picture here. Adi was drawn to the way The Knife used synthetic sounds to access something deeply human — the paradox of cold production carrying so much warmth. It expanded her sense of what her sonic palette could include. "You don't have to choose between feeling and experimentation," she says. "The best music refuses to."

10. Alanis Morissette — "You Oughta Know"

She saves this one for last because it was the first. Alanis was the gateway — the artist who made a young Adi understand that fury and heartbreak and humor could all live in the same song, and that a woman could be messy and complicated and still be the hero of her own story. "I heard that song and thought, oh — music is allowed to do this?" she says. "I never looked back."

What the List Tells Us

Look at this playlist as a whole and a picture emerges: an artist drawn to emotional extremes, to the intersection of the cerebral and the visceral, to women who refuse to make themselves smaller. Every track on this list is doing something structurally interesting while also hitting you somewhere below the ribs. That's the Adi Ulmansky formula in a nutshell — the head and the heart, working together, never letting either one off the hook.

Hit play. Then go back and listen to her catalog with fresh ears. The fingerprints are everywhere.