Alicia Keys: KEYS, review: world-class range, ambition and accomplishment

She burst onto the world stage aged just 19. Her breakout single (Fallin’) was a huge global smash, a heartbreakingly romantic piano ballad with a preternatural, octave-busting vocal that touched Aretha Franklin heights, with songwriting that drew comparisons to Carole King.

Her 2021 debut album, Songs in A Minor, sold 12 million copies and saw her hailed as the saviour of soul music. And if this reminds you of anyone, then you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Adele once told Rolling Stone that hearing Alicia Keys as a youngster was “life defining”. The two performed Bob Dylan’s Make You Feel My Love together (with Keys on piano) at Keys’s annual charity ball in 2008, when Adele’s star was still rising.

Pop music relentlessly seeks out the next big thing. At 40, Keys may no longer be the hottest contemporary female singer-songwriter on the planet. It has been nearly 10 years since 2012’s Girl on Fire landed her a significant hit single and chart-topping album. But there has been no diminishment in her talent as she follows last year’s critically acclaimed ALICIA with the extravagant double album KEYS (see what she did there?).

If anything, Keys’s eighth album is just too multifarious to fit into straightforward commercial boxes. Using her considerable classical piano skills as a songwriting base, with her fluid yet emotionally raw voice travelling from resonant low notes to etheric heights, she joins the dots between hip hop, jazz, old school R&B, sci-fi club bangers and intimate balladry. She lays out her artistic manifesto on the noirish Nat King Cole, which is not so much a tribute to the great crooner as a dedication to becoming (like his theme song) “unforgettable”.

The production here crosses epic, John Barry-style Bond balladry with a dark trip hop drama evoking Portishead, as Keys insists “You’ve got to put the time into timeless”. On Is It Insane, Keys dives deep into vintage jazz for a torch ballad of sinister, obsessive jealousy, while Billions drifts off into the space funk cosmos for a gauzy evocation of eternal romantic dedication.

The 26 tracks are grouped into “Originals” and “Unlocked”. What this really means is that the second half of the album offers radical remixes and rearrangements, with rapper Lil Wayne swaggering on to Unforgettable and a slippery hip hop groove adding contemporary bite to the basement jazz of Is It Insane.

Anyone attached to idealistic notions of albums as cohesive bodies of work might question whether this is just a marketing gimmick, but I suspect the truth is that this is where all music is headed.

KEYS is not a double album as we used to know it, it is a post-album playlist for the age of streaming, with tracks reshaped for different moods and in no way curtailed by the need to create a definitive physical product. There’s a range, ambition, confidence and accomplishment on display that suggests Keys’s competition should not be considered today’s chart-toppers but such all-time American soul geniuses as Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. Adele who?

KEYS by Alicia Keys is out now on RCA