Alicia Keys is a creature of habit when it comes to her music. With “Piano and I,” the first track on her hugely successful debut album Songs in A Minor, she started the tradition of opening her albums with a clearly marked intro. Although the format varied—wordless classical compositions, piano-backed spoken-word pieces, a short poem—these intros generally served two purposes: reminding us of her piano chops and elucidating her state of mind during the recording process. If you study a person’s habits enough, a picture of who they are should start to emerge. Yet HERE, Keys’ sixth studio album, does little to further our understanding of who Keys is.
“The Beginning (Interlude),” HERE’s opener, sets the scene for the album to work as a series of extended metaphors. So when Keys says “I’m the musical to the project fables/I’m the words scratched out on the record label/I’m the wind when the record spins/I’m the dramatic static before the song begins,” you don’t need to take it literally. Instead, by personifying hip-hop, she is performing the first of several shifts in narrative perspective.
It helps to take this into consideration early on, so that it’s not entirely confusing when Keys starts singing from the perspective of a 29-year-old addict on “Illusion of Bliss.” Or on “Kill Your Mama,” where she takes on the role of spokesperson for all of Mother Earth’s wayward children, piling the platitudes onto a simple guitar melody: “Is there any savin’ us/We’ve become so dangerous/Is there any change in us/Even for the sake of love.”
Still, this is an Alicia Keys record, and it wouldn’t be wrong to expect her to devote time to herself. There are only three tracks on which you could safely guess that she is giving any insight into her world. “Work on It” is a look just beneath the surface at a relationship that takes, well, work— but the intrigue is lacking, even with production from the usually unflappable Pharrell Williams. “Girl Can’t Be Herself” is surely the anthem for her makeup-free movement and, by her own admission, a tool for working through some of the insecurities that she tackles in the lyrics. “Blended Family (What You Do For Love)” rolls along as an earnest-but-slightly-awkward song about the dynamic within her home, before getting completely sabotaged by a throwaway verse from guest A$AP Rocky.
HERE is punctuated with interludes that feature recordings of candid discussions between Keys and her friends including, reportedly, Nas. It seems unjust that these brief appearances spark more curiosity about the speakers than the songs that refer directly to the artist with top billing, and the rest of the tracks do little to address this balance—at least from a lyrical standpoint.
To her credit, she flexes some surprising dexterity, moving easily between ballads and more uptempo beats and varying her delivery to occasionally take on a rapper’s cadence, for example on “The Gospel.” She’s probably not about to rebrand herself as a spitter, but the piano melody textured by a stuttering drum pattern works well. The drum programming comes courtesy of Harold Lilly, while songwriting and production duties fell largely to Mark Batson and Swizz Beatz, who left no traces of his signature sound. Along with Keys the four form a production group called The ILLuminaries, and they prove on several occasions how the hivemind approach to beatmaking can pay off.
The rhythms on HERE represent a departure from her previous efforts and indicate a willingness to experiment with her sound but the lyrics, which rarely betray a sense of adventure, cancel out most of this good work. While it might not mean much in the age of streaming, there is something particularly confounding about the decision to relegate the most exciting lead single (“In Common”) to a bonus track on the deluxe edition, when the rest of the album didn’t quite follow through on the song’s promise. Alicia Keys has worked hard to build up enough name recognition; she can tick off multiple successes after several years in the game; she has earned the right to throw caution to the wind. It’s hard to shake the feeling that this record was a missed opportunity to do so.
