Alicia Keys review, ALICIA: Self-titled album shows singer rattling between a range of identities

Alicia Keys says that her self-titled seventh album will finally reveal “who I am and who I want to be”. The statement is an admission that she’s been holding herself back for years. And who can blame her?

In More Myself, the autobiography Keys published this spring, she gives a powerful account of her hardscrabble upbringing in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. The gifted pianist (who walked away from a scholarship to Columbia University to pursue a pop career) was the only child of a single mother living in a one room apartment, beyond which: “There were pimps and prostitutes everywhere. There were those XXX-theatres everywhere.” As a young woman, she “definitely learned early how to call the least attention to myself possible”. She wore tomboy clothes, avoided bright colours and carried a knife in order to “be separate from that space that I was walking in”.

The self-preservation skills she learnt on those streets paid off when it came to surviving as a young woman in the music business. Apart from one early photoshoot (which left her in tears after she was cajoled into stripping “half-naked”), Keys has maintained a cool control of her sound, image and private life. Although she “loves to curse”, the public doesn’t hear her do it much – she explains that she has struggled to maintain her dignity as a black woman regularly speaking/singing out on issues of racial and gender equality.

The last time I interviewed Keys, she told me she could handle a full day under the A-Lister’s media spotlight, then ride the subway home unrecognised. The downside of this is that, despite her frequently stated goal of singing “her truth”, Keys’s quirkier, sparkier side too often remains tastefully guarded on record. On this record, I repeatedly hear a woman with the potential to create something extraordinary choosing to ride the mainstream R&B train.

I’m not totally convinced by this so-called “genre-less” album. But it’s certainly one that sees Key’s remarkable gift for classic soul-indebted melody expressed through some stranger – and certainly more eclectic – sounds than she’s tried before. Many of the fresh flavours come courtesy of a terrific contributing cast – she's roped in everyone from Diamond Platnumz (who became the first sub-Saharan African artist to reach a billion YouTube streams in June) through to England’s 2017 Mercury Prize-winner Sampha, and snappy rhyme spitter Tierra Whack. As she promises on the pleasantly noodly, neo-soul opener “Truth Without Love”: “Many on here extra salty!”

The title of that song is a reference to American clergyman Warren W Wiersbe’s bumpersticker aphorism: “Truth without love is brutality, and love without truth is hypocrisy.” Although her lyrics are less concise, Keys is clearly promising both. Her signature piano skills dance through this track but then slip under the radar until the final third of the album.

ALICIA kicks off for real with its standout second track, “Time Machine”. It’s a glorious, giddy swirl of retro-futuristic funk – think Stevie Wonder in space – well-visualised in a video that shows Keys rollerskating in liberated loops. The solid throb of the bass groove is beautifully offset by sci-fi synths, sweet, gauzy layers of backing vocals, and distant tangy wafts of what sounds like a sitar. She sings about the “fear” we all feel when forced to confront who we really are, but advises “go out of your mind/ once you free your mind, there’s beauty in everything”.

The danceable dub of “Wasted Energy” keeps the groovy ‘tude up. The anthemic single “Underdog” – on which Keys pays tearjerking tribute to single mothers and bus-stop hustlers – is driven by the bouncy busker strum and looped handclaps of co-writer Ed Sheeran. Keys takes a chill-break with the murky-blue beats of “3 Hour Drive”, on which her pretty vocals are slinkily offset by Sampha’s huskier tone. “So Done” is a laconic duet with youthful wonk-soul crooner Khalid, where the pair of former people-pleasers declare a shared ambition to flip off expectations.

Keys saves a Black Lives Matter-themed anthem for the end, with “Perfect Way to Die”. “Simple walk to the corner store/ Mama never thought she would be gettin' a call from the coroner/ Said her son's been gunned down, been gunned down/ Can you come now?” The emotional catch in Keys’s voice pulls something deeper and more certain from her than the personal truth she attempts to explore on songs such as “Me x 7”. But then I suspect both the artist and her critics push too hard for her to find one true self. Whereas this record sees her rattling between a range of identities, it’s still a lovely bunch of Keys.