Every Alicia Keys Album Ranked, from Songs in A Minor to Keys

Less a masterpiece than a promissory note, Alicia Keys’s Songs in A Minor—which celebrated its 20th anniversary earlier this year—signaled the emergence of a genuine talent. Something about the album made it more exciting than any number of more accomplished debuts. Here we had an exceptionally skilled performer attempting an unusually sophisticated take on urban pop. Keys is one of the few R&B performers who realizes that a strong melody and a well-structured beat are both, fundamentally, exercises in composition, and she approaches both aspects of her songcraft with the attention to detail that her pop-classicist chops would suggest. There’s a holism to her tunes that makes the beats-plus-hooks formulas of her contemporaries look amateurish.

Two decades later, Keys is still making good on that promise with her ambitious double album Keys. To celebrate its release, we’ve ranked all eight of Keys’s studio albums. Matthew Cole

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on June 1, 2021.

8. Girl on Fire (2012)

Alicia Keys’s fifth album, Girl on Fire, is less a portrait of the singer’s womanhood at a crossroads than it is another extension of a career spent predominantly navigating straight down the middle of the road. Of the album’s 12 songs, only the title track seems like a disruptive capitulation to market demands: “Girl on Fire” invites Nicki Minaj to spit game atop Billy Squier’s “Big Beat,” while Keys majestically howls over repeated power chords lifted straight from her “Empire State of Mind” playbook. Nothing if not magnanimous, Keys lets husband Swizz Beatz step in to co-produce the drumline-accompanied “New Day,” an unfortunately trite motivational anthem that gets compelling only during the coda when Swizz chops up the beat and Keys’s piano lines into pulp. Slightly more successful is the babble cameo by the singer-songwriter’s toddler son, Egypt, during the outro to “When It’s All Over,” a deep and resonant groove with muted breakbeats and squelching synth counterpoints to Keys’s low-end piano chords. But if Girl on Fire is a family affair, her family is vast and expensive. In addition to Minaj and Maxwell, Rodney Jerkins, Babyface, Dr. Dre, Bruno Mars, Jamie xx, and Frank Ocean all earn production or songwriting credits, though most of their efforts end up emerging 100-percent Keys: slow, methodical, and rewardingly quiet. Eric Henderson

7. Alicia (2020)

Like the most effective political pop, Alicia Keys’s seventh album, Alicia, couches its socio-political observations in a personal context, unspooling to reveal the interconnectedness of its subject’s view of both the world and herself. At times, Keys’s optimism about the state of the world feels naïve, like an echo from an era when “hope and change” felt attainable, as on the dreamy “Authors of Forever,” with its persistent refrain of “it’s alright.” But that sense of displaced positivity is offset by the directness with which Keys sings about police violence on “Perfect Way to Die” and so-called “essential workers” on “Good Job,” whose sense of hope is tinged by deep despair. Still, those two closing tracks’ spare arrangements of piano and vocal feel too conservative for their chosen subject matter. And when Keys’s signature piano is traded for acoustic guitar, the result is neo-soul formlessness that, generously, could be described as “mood music.” Sal Cinquemani

6. The Element of Freedom (2009)

The Element of Freedom strikes an appealing, somewhat original aesthetic that succumbs to neither of the two clichés that dominate neo-soul releases: It’s not a stodgily reverential retro fest, nor is it a formulaic synthesis of smooth vocals and trendy hip-hop beats. The best moments on the album come early, with the clear standout being the single “Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart.” There, some retro synth work lends a funky backdrop for Keys’s breathy vamping, alternating disco-diva choruses with Prince-worthy verses. A similar aesthetic extends to “Wait Til You See My Smile,” where Keys jumps ably between a sultry lower register and an artfully strained high while synths and strings pile up to “Purple Rain” proportions. Cole

5. Keys (2021)

Freed from whatever pressure she may have felt to produce pop hits in the past, Alicia Keys exudes an effortlessness throughout her ambitious double album, Keys. The lyrics to “Best of Me” epitomize the album’s loose musical spirit: “We can live on the air/Do you understand?” Early in her career, Keys was lazily lumped into the neo-soul genre, often compared to predecessors like Erykah Badu and Jill Scott. But with Keys, she has, in a sense, found her way home. A compilation of the most successful tracks from both halves of the album would have made for a slightly stronger effort. As is, though, it serves as a testament to both Keys’s willingness to expand beyond the boundaries of genre constraints. Cinquemani

4. As I Am (2007)

If Alicia Keys’s first two albums kept one ear trained on the present, the singer-songwriter’s third effort, As I Am, found her fully embracing bygone R&B. There are no rappers or hype men announcing the arrival of a new Alicia Keys joint. When the hooks kick in, you might feel like you’ve known these songs for years, and while that could point to the derivativeness of Keys’s songwriting, neo-soul is nothing if not comfortingly familiar. Keys trades her usual acoustic keys for an electric keyboard a la Stevie Wonder on “No One,” and the song’s optimistic missive is lifted straight from “No Woman, No Cry,” while Keys’s voice sounds like a harder-edged Sade. She employs this vocal technique, reaching for notes just outside her range, throughout As I Am, and the fact that her voice sounds strained and tattered on songs like “The Thing About Love” only deepens her interpretation of that “thing.” Cinquemani

3. Songs in A Minor (2001)

Alicia Keys’s heavily hyped debut on Clive Davis’s then-fledgling J Records was co-written, arranged, and produced by the 19-year-old, who flaunts her obvious soul and R&B influences and classical piano chops with a simple yet distinct approach. The more adult content of a cover of Prince’s “Girlfriend” and the Brian McKnight-penned “Never Felt This Way” seems to elude the singer, but the album’s original cuts boast a musical and intellectual sophistication that’s beyond her years. Keys’s breakthrough single, the gospel-tinged “Fallin’,” starts out simply with measured piano and basic drum programming, eventually building to a crescendo of operatic proportions, while the poignant “Butterflyz” features a restrained vocal that never permeates the track’s tight arrangement. The music-box tranquility of “Caged Bird” offers an alternate (and obviously personalized) take on Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, where Keys quells the pain of isolation with the power of music: “Only joy comes from song.” It’s a sentiment she’s carried throughout her career. Cinquemani

2. Here (2016)

The fearlessness with which Alicia Keys has ventured outside her vocal range—a signature tick, for better or worse—has always been endearing, but when she stretches to reach the notes near the end of Here’s “Pawn It All,” the effect is both elastic and ecstatic. And when her voice fails her on “Illusion of Bliss,” she embraces the moment and lets out a guttural wail, lending weight to what might otherwise have been a pedantic narrative of a drug addict in a spiritual spiral. Keys’s voice cracks and creaks as she pleads for salvation on “Hallelujah,” the vocal imperfections, spare percussion, and soulful handclaps juxtaposed with a more refined string section. The songs here are less rigidly adherent to formula: “The Gospel” forgoes a traditional chorus altogether, while “She Don’t Really Care” breaks from its ode to New York City’s black and brown women for an extended vibraphone jam session before seguing into an entirely different song. At times, Here feels like it wants to be What’s Going On, the standard-bearer of socially conscious soul, but it’s more akin to Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, thoughtfully mixing the political with the personal. Cinquemani

1. The Diary of Alicia Keys (2003)

The Diary of Alicia Keys is steeped in the kind of authentic retro soul that recalls Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, but it also feels of a piece with contemporary classics like The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill that deftly juxtapose modernism and classicism. Once you realize there’s nothing new about neo-soul, it’s easier to appreciate the music for what it is and what it honors, rather than what it’s supposed to represent. You actually believe Keys is a struggling waitress on the Kanye West-produced “You Don’t Know My Name,” a lo-fi slice of vintage soul that makes much more sense next to tracks like “If I Was Your Woman/Walk on By” than it did as a standalone hit on urban radio. The album kicks off proper with two chunky, horn-infused club tracks, “Karma” and “Heartburn,” but quickly moves into Keys’s signature click-track percussion romanticism. The exception is “Dragon Days,” with its bouncy keyboards, classic rock guitar licks, and sultry, surprisingly disco-fied vocal delivery: “I feel like an addict must feel when he feeds.” Despite all the fanfare that surrounded her debut, Keys remains grounded in the music on Diary, resulting in the rare sophomore effort that surpasses its predecessor on almost every level. Cinquemani