When you’re the fêted new singer-songwriter on the block, fraternising at the odd red-carpet party comes with the turf. But that doesn’t faze the 19-year-old Adele. “Nah. If Mum went to a mate’s for a dinner party, as she’s a single parent, I’d go with her. I’m very confident around older people.” Moving on, she freestyles in a good-natured rant against the suffocating shortcomings of the education system. At some point, she uses the word “unbovvered”. She is smoking those Joan Collins-style match-thin cigarettes called Vogue (because she’s got a cold, and they are “healthier” than normal fags), and that is about all of Adele that would fit any kind of sexy, fashiony template. She’s not made up, she’s got a cold sore, she’s got a loud voice and her thoughts spill out in a friendly stream of confident, uncensored opinion. She is not tortured, angry, affected, self-effacing or cautious; she’s just, as someone once said, all right, thanks. She is dressed so normally as to be extraordinary, professing to like tracksuits by Nike and Primark. In fact, “I feel really silly when I’m done up, with those f***ing Spanx knickers on, tied up in a corset. It’s like: ‘Argh! I can’t breathe.’ Wearing that stuff on photo shoots sets you up for attention and as some kind of trendsetter, and I’m just a singer.” Unarguably a talent, Adele is the epitome of the new wave of artists we’ll affectionately call the gobby girls.

After a barrage of “hormone rock” – female artists who shrink and apologise for themselves, or assail us with bloke-style cock-rock posturing – the gobby girl is quite something, and she chimes perfectly with the latest generation of postfeminist young women. If you’ve walked round Topshop lately, or sat on the top deck of the bus, listening to schoolgirls mouth off, or chatted to a friend’s 18-year-old daughter at a wedding, you may have noticed that girls are getting a lot more noisy (and, as I remember it, we were never that mousey in the 1980s).

Nothing quite embodies this new generation better than the hot musical talents who have broken through in the past year. Fierce and loud, they have a style that is singular, strong and neither deliberately sexless nor concertedly sexy. It’s a straight line from bra-burner to career girl to ladette to Spice Girl to young woman who is largely untroubled by sexual objectification, the glass ceiling and much of what haunted previous generations of women. Interestingly, most of these girls’ mothers were at some time single, working parents. It makes perfect sense to me when I find out Adele’s mother is my age. It makes sense that the daughters of my generation have turned out like that.

Young female artists these days are confident, talented and, in the respect that they were mostly raised just by their mothers, the closest we’ve come to an Amazon generation. Which is not to say they’re all immune to the neuroses so familiar to previous generations. The spiky Norwegian Ida Maria, 23, Adele, 19, the north Londoner Kate Nash, 20, and, of course, Lily Allen, 22, Beth Ditto, 26, and Amy Winehouse, 24, all have their experiences at the sharp end of body-image issues, but all have articulated it clearly.

Wait a Minute (Just a Touch), the first single from Estelle’s upcoming album, has been praised by some of the biggest names in American R&B and hip-hop, though it contains some distinctly un-R&B and hip-hop sentiments, such as “Wrap it up, ’coz I ain’t carrying your embryo” (meaning, “Wear a condom, because I don’t want to get pregnant”). Estelle has been shipped over to New York to bring some much-needed life to the female urban-music scene. “The women here, they’ve got to be a lady,” she says. “They’re told, ‘Smile like this. Put your leg like that.’ ” When people suggested that she take some lessons in how to behave that way, she dispatched them quick-smart. “People like you when you’re real. Nobody buys into that. I ain’t going there, never. It’d muck up the brand.”

Adele agrees: “If anyone mentioned media training to me, I’d say, ‘No way.’ If you are a confected product, nobody believes in it – they don’t believe the singing, what they look like or who they are. All people would think is, ‘Go away – you’re annoying me.’ ” As Estelle says, “If you aren’t outspoken and opinionated [these days], people will think you are young, silly and not brainy.”

Beth Ditto does what she wants. Imagine another time when an American singer could have the body shape she has, strip to her underwear on stage and write an agony-aunt column, all while being crowned one of the coolest female artists of her time. Kate Nash can’t be bothered with bogus attitude, either: “Trying to be cool – what’s the point of that? I want to hear something that came from you. It’ll be interesting because it’s natural.”

What defines this freshman class of female musicians is that they don’t really know anything about feminism. “Feminism, sexism – I’ve never been around it,” Adele says. “I know that things have moved on in the workplace and in the home, but I don’t have an opinion on it.” Nash says: “Feminism came from Emily [as in Emmeline] Pankhurst – she had badges with her name on in 1904.” If they were the sort to do so, these girls would say they were postfeminist, but actually they just see themselves as equal and don’t think too much of it.

Ida Maria says that her parents “played a big part in making me a human – not a girl, or a feminist. I don’t care about that; I don’t care about anything if it looks boring”. Maria will happily invade a stage and bite a singer’s backside. In her ferociously physical shows, she inflicts the odd bit of accidental damage on herself – head wounds, cracked ribs – but she is no riot girl with a buzz cut. She’s extremely cute.

She, too, agrees that this generation of female musicians have a lot more gob on them than previous ones, but beyond that, she says simply: “There’s definitely something happening with female musicians, and that is, we’ve got a bit more space. We were the first generation to be raised free. Many girls today are strong without questioning where that strength came from.”

Adele’s Hometown Glory is available now on 7-inch vinyl. Her debut single on XL Recordings, Chasing Pavements, is released in January 2008, taken from her debut album, 19

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