Alicia (album)

In 2016, Alicia Keys released her sixth studio album Here, a raw departure from the more sophisticated and anthemic R&B music of her first five albums.[1] Sung with tougher vocals and against edgy sounds from hip hop, funk, and jazz, Keys' topical lyrics for the album explored themes beyond unfixed romances, such as sexuality, addiction, poverty, and environmental degradation.[2][1] In the spirit of Here's unrefined aesthetic, the singer stopped wearing makeup that year.[1] After its release, she took a break from recording music and served as a coach on the singing competition series The Voice for three seasons. She missed the show's 2017 season to focus on making Alicia.[3]

Jungle City Studios, where all but one of Alicia's songs were recorded

Keys reportedly returned to Oven Studios, her personal studio in New York City, to record Alicia.[4] However, several other studios were later credited for its recording, including NYC's Jungle City Studios, where recording for 14 of the album's 15 tracks took place.[5] Alicia was produced primarily by Keys, with alternating contributions from an assorted group of record producers and songwriters,[2] including her husband Swizz Beatz, Ludwig Göransson, Ed Sheeran, Tory Lanez, and The-Dream.[6] For certain songs, Keys collaborated with guest vocalists such as Tierra Whack, Jill Scott, Miguel, Sampha, and Khalid.[7] By May 2017, the album had been "halfway" finished, according to Keys.[3]

During Alicia's recording, Keys wrote her memoir More Myself: A Journey (2020),[8] reflecting on her life and career up to that point.[9] She continued writing the memoir into May 2019, by which time the album was being completed.[8] Keys said that working on both projects served as "the best therapy" ever for her.[10]

Musically, Alicia continues in the experimental manner of Here[1] while revisiting the distinctive piano-based balladry and bass drum-driven R&B of Keys' earlier work.[11] However, it avoids emphatic hooks[11] and motifs characteristic of her past music. Instead, the album's "subtly melodic soul" experiments are embellished with ambient, electro, and textured sounds from music sequencers, according to A. D. Amorosi of Variety, who adds that Alicia is "still a singer and pianist's album" but one that renders Keys' instrument in new forms.[1] The music throughout has largely subtle and downtempo dynamics,[12] except for "Love Looks Better", which is produced in a loftier pop-soul style.[13] According to The New York Times chief pop critic Jon Pareles, the music "often hollows itself out around her, opening deep bass chasms or surrounding sparse instrumentation with echoey voids".[2]

The album's direction, which Keys describes as "genreless", is oriented toward evoking a particular mood rather than conforming to a singular sound.[13] In the process, individual songs incorporate elements of particular styles, including progressive soul ("Truth Without Love"),[16] old-fashioned funk ("Time Machine"),[13] dance-pop ("Authors of Forever"),[15] Caribbean folk music ("Underdog"),[17] dub ("Wasted Energy"),[11] hip hop ("Me x 7"),[16] downtempo R&B ("Show Me Love"),[13] folk[16] and country ("Gramercy Park"),[17] and chamber music ("Perfect Way to Die").[2] Keys says that "Time Machine" is influenced specifically by the funk rock band Funkadelic.[18] "Me x 7" has upbeat, sparsely produced rhythms in the manner of its guest mumble rapper Tierra Whack's solo work.[7] A section of Alicia's middle tracks substitute Keys' piano for acoustic guitar within a more free-form style of neo soul.[11] "Jill Scott", whose namesake provides a brief spoken word interlude, features Keys singing in a high register style similar to Scott's.[7]

Altogether, Alicia is described by The Line of Best Fit writer Udit Mahalingam as a collection of "orchestral pop, acoustic soul, and jittery contemporary R&B".[19] In comparison to Here, Shakeena Johnson of Clash says it is "less pop and more R&B".[20] Although deeming it often a work of contemporary R&B, Helen Brown of The Independent believes the album conveys traditional soul melodies "through some stranger—and certainly more eclectic—sounds than she's tried before".[21]

Alicia continues in the socially-conscious thematic vein of Here,[13] featuring impressionistic lyrics[1] and personal narratives that make sociopolitical connections between the singer's view of herself and the world around her.[11] Keys says the album reflects different dimensions of her relationship to people as a whole and that writing it encouraged greater introspection. "I never realized how much I relied on only one side", she explains. "How much I had hidden away the parts that expressed anger, rage, sensuality, or vulnerability."[23] Much like More Myself, Alicia explores and conceptualizes "identity, and what makes us up to be who we are, and the expectations that are put upon us mostly from outside sources – societally or from your family, or from those people that you love, or yourself."[24] In Pareles' observations, the singer advocates equanimity "but it's often tinged with ambivalence", reflecting "misgivings, recriminations and regrets" shared in her memoir.[2] Similarly, musicOMH journalist Nick Smith observes feelings of "hope, despair, frustration and even ambivalence" in her narratives.[17]

Keys (center right) at the 2017 Women's March. Alicia reflects on sociopolitical concerns and the singer's relationship to the world around her.

Alicia opens with "Truth Without Love", which puts forth the idea that truth in society has become "elusive". The next song, "Time Machine", addresses fears of introspection and advocates the pursuit of free thought, rather than longing for the past, as a means to achieve peace of mind.[11] "Underdog" is an ode to "young teachers", "student doctors", and "single mothers waiting on a check to come".[13] "Authors of Forever", among other songs, conveys more positive pleas for hope and change, as well as an understanding of the multifaceted nature in individuals,[11][22] promoting the idea that "we're here to make meanin' for as long we're breathin' / and it's alright / whoever you are / it's alright".[25] A more desperate sense of hope features in the album's closing series of unadorned piano-and-vocal performances, "Perfect Way to Die" and "Good Job", which thematize police brutality and essential work, respectively.[11] The former is written from the perspective of a mother in grief over her son, who was shot to death by the police, while the latter is written in tribute to "the mothers, the fathers, the teachers that reach us", and other people simply trying to get through an ordinary day.[13]

Among Alicia's love songs, "3 Hour Drive" is a duet between Keys and Sampha, who both lament a lover's separation over a descending chord progression. "Show Me Love" and "Love Looks Better" express more confident relations between lovers. Both the waltz-like "Gramercy Park" and the Khalid duet "So Done" feature Keys trying to make peace with having struggled to appease the expectations of other people, with the latter expressing a departure from "fighting myself, going to hell" in favor of "living the way that I want".[2]

Miguel appeared on the album's lead single, "Show Me Love", and joined Keys for her performance at the 2019 Latin Grammy Awards.

On September 17, 2019, Keys debuted the album's lead single, "Show Me Love", and its accompanying music video at Dolby Soho in New York City.[26] The first live performance of the track took place that weekend as part of her set at the 2019 iHeartRadio Music Festival.[27] In November, Keys was joined by Miguel, Pedro Capó, and Farruko at the 20th Annual Latin Grammy Awards for a medley of a Spanish version of the song and "Calma" (2018).[28] On November 20, "Time Machine" was released as the next single.[29] Keys revealed the album's title in a December interview with Billboard[10] and formally announced Alicia the following month by posting a release date of March 20, 2020, and the cover art to her Instagram account.[30] In January, Keys also returned as host for the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards, where she was joined by Brittany Howard in a performance of "Underdog"[31] (released as Alicia's third single on January 9).[32] The single was featured in a TV ad for Amazon Music[33] and performed by Keys on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.[34]

Keys also made promotional appearances in Europe. She held a private show for the radio station NRJ in Paris on February 4[35] and a concert at Bush Hall in London on February 7. The latter was an atypically small venue for the singer (with an approximately 400-person crowd that day). At Bush Hall, she was joined by a four-person backing band and two vocalists while playing an upright piano (rather than her customary grand piano) and a Moog synthesizer, used specifically for a psychedelic funk rendition of "Time Machine" and "Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart" (2009). Other songs played were "Unbreakable" (2005), a piano-based cover of Billie Eilish's "Everything I Wanted" (2019), "Show Me Love", the acoustic "Underdog", and the more vocally virtuosic "Girl on Fire" (2012) and "Empire State of Mind Part II" (2010), which closed the show in rousing fashion. However, for much of the concert, "she stood at the upright [piano], bashing out melodies and singing with versatility", as Financial Times critic Ludovic Hunter-Tilney reported.[18] In the UK, Keys also appeared on The Graham Norton Show (in February)[36] and the Live Lounge segment on BBC Radio 1 (in March), where she performed "Time Machine" and "Underdog".[37]

Professional ratings

Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
AnyDecentMusic?	7.2/10[68]
Metacritic	77/100[69]
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[70]
Clash	7/10[20]
Evening Standard	[15]
The Independent	[21]
Mojo	[16]
NME	[13]
The Observer	[71]
Rolling Stone	[72]
Slant Magazine	[11]
The Times	[73]

Alicia was met with generally positive reviews. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from professional publications, the album received an average score of 77, based on 12 reviews.[69] AnyDecentMusic? assigned it a score of 7.2 out of 10, based on the site's assessment of the critical consensus.[68]

Reviewing for The Times, chief music critic Will Hodgkinson hailed Alicia as "songs in the key of modern life from R&B royalty" and welcomed Keys' return to the sophisticated sounds of her first album, Songs in A Minor (2001).[73] Nick Levine, writing for NME, was impressed by the cohesive musical feel throughout and the skill behind Keys' ballads, which he said emanate well-intentioned positive energy and empathic political engagement. He also believed that the album's postponed release amid the pandemic made the subject matter more timely and therapeutic for listeners.[13] Slant Magazine's Sal Cinquemani also applauded the content and compared it to "the most effective political pop", saying Keys "strikes a careful balance between hope and despair". While highlighting the more radically styled collaborations in "Wasted Energy" and "Me x 7", he concluded that Alicia is "at once her most accessible and forward-minded album in years".[11] In Rolling Stone, Jon Dolan regarded it as among Keys' "most musically engaging" records and cited her strong suit to be coping ballads such as "Perfect Way to Die" and "Good Job". "Generosity tempered with humility is a rare and welcome look", he wrote of her performance. "It takes knowledge of self, care for others, truth through a lens of love, to get it right."[72] Concurring with both Levine and Dolan's points, Atwood Magazine's Josh Weiner said that the repeated delays had not dated the record's musical qualities while current events had "rendered it an especially powerful and timely release", especially in the case of the last two songs. "Great art sure does have a way of gaining even more meaning and impact as time goes on", he concluded.[74]

Several reviewers highlighted Keys' singing on Alicia. In The Sunday Times, Dan Cairns said the compositions are on-par with the "classic" songwriting of her earliest albums and that they accentuate her vocals, which he described as "soaring, swooping, scatting, richly nuanced, deploying full-throated passion and pin-drop restraint".[75] The Arts Desk journalist Joe Muggs singled out Keys' performances on "Perfect Way to Die", "Wasted Energy", and "Time Machine", where her "multi-octave range is put to fantastic use harmonizing with herself". While observing a few instances of flashy singing techniques elsewhere, he speculated whether the album as a whole hints at "a Keys album where she drops the showbiz and kicks out the jams the whole way through".[12] AllMusic reviewer Andy Kellman found Alicia to be performed "with some of her most nuanced vocals", but was less impressed by the material, the best of which he felt had already been released as singles. Ultimately, he deemed it "Keys' most moderate work, seemingly hedged with an objective to appeal to as many listeners as possible".[70] Mojo magazine's James McNair griped about Keys' altruistic politics being "at times a tad cloyingly expressed" on an album otherwise impressive for her "exquisitely malleable voice, slickly inventine production tics, and winning vocal support" from artists such as Sampha and Diamond Platnumz.[16]

For the 2021 NAACP Image Awards, Alicia was nominated in the category of Outstanding Album, which will be presented on March 27, 2021.[76]

Notes

• ^{^[a]} denotes co-producer

Information is taken from the album's liner notes.[5]

• Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the music industry

• Alicia at Discogs (list of releases)