Written and produced largely by Keys, the album also features songwriting and production contributions from Swizz Beatz, Ryan Tedder, Johnny McDaid, Ed Sheeran, and The-Dream, among others.

Keys collaborated with more artists on the recording than in her previous albums, enlisting vocalists such as Sampha, Tierra Whack, Diamond Platnumz, Snoh Aalegra, and Jill Scott for certain tracks.

Throughout, individual songs incorporate sounds from a wide range of other genres, including orchestral pop, progressive soul, funk, ambient, country, and Caribbean music.

Keys has described the album as therapeutic and reflective of greater introspection in herself, expressing ideas and feelings of hope, frustration, despair, ambivalence, and equanimity shared in her memoir More Myself (2020), which was written during Alicia's recording.

It was marketed with an extended traditional rollout campaign that featured various media appearances by Keys and the release of seven singles, including the Miguel duet "Show Me Love", "Time Machine", "Underdog", and "So Done" (with Khalid).

After a surprise announcement of its impending release in September, Alicia debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 in its first week and became Keys' eighth top-10 record in the US, while charting in the top 10 in several other countries.

A critical success, Alicia received praise for Keys' nuanced vocal performances and the music's broad appeal, while her thematic messages were considered balanced, healing, and timely against the backdrop of unfolding world events.

[3] Sung with tougher vocals and against edgy sounds from hip hop, funk, and jazz, Keys' topical lyrics for the album explored themes beyond the uncertain romantic relationships that predominated her earlier music, such as sexuality, addiction, poverty, and environmental degradation.

"It was Alicia, in the end", as Mincieli recounts, "pulling few pieces from Ryan and added [sic] some things on her own for you to hear her lyrics, vocals, and emotions without all the scratches, scribbles, stutters, and production that was overtaking the song".

[11] In its final chapter, she explained how the album's creative process encouraged more collaborations than in her earlier recordings, when she had preferred to work alone from fear of being misunderstood, controlled, and vulnerable as an artist.

[16] 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".

[10] 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",[22] while Nick Smith of musicOMH observes "sonics [that] are manifold", encompassing "reggae, R&B, funk and even country".

[3][14] The album's pervading theme of self-knowledge departs from the thematic focus that had made Keys popular in the past, specifically her meditations on romantic relationships, strong families, and female empowerment.

[12] We are lost and lonely people and we're looking for a reason and it's all right So let's celebrate the dreamers, we embrace the space between us, and it's all right We're all in this boat together and we're sailing toward the future and it's all right We can make the whole thing better, we're the authors of forever – and it's all right 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.

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".

[35] Keys revealed the album's title in a December interview with Billboard[13] and formally announced Alicia the following month by posting a release date of March 20, 2020, and the cover art to her Instagram account.

[44] In response to the COVID-19 pandemic (declared later in March), Keys became among the many high-profile recording acts and adherents of traditional rollout campaigns to delay their albums, joining Lady Gaga, Willie Nelson, and Sam Smith.

[16] In April, the singer appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert via video call, where she discussed the album's extended delay and her memoir,[48] which had been published the previous month.

"Whether you're on the front lines at the hospitals, balancing work, family, and homeschool teaching, delivering mail, packages, or food, or facing other personal difficulties because of COVID-19 ... You are seen, loved, and deeply appreciated", she wrote.

While posting the single on her Twitter account, Keys commented on its relevancy and condemned "the destructive culture of police violence" as senseless as the song's titular phrase.

"[53] In June 2020, Keys premiered "Gramercy Park" during her first-ever appearance on NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts, alongside performances of "Underdog", "Show Me Love", and her 2001 song "Fallin'".

[64] The London-based marketing firm Diabolical was also hired by Sony Music (the owner of Keys' record label RCA) to design and put up posters promoting the release at various points in the city's eight boroughs.

Echoing Alicia's front cover, the design posed a seemingly nude and barefaced Keys against a pale red backdrop with the album title rendered in simple font.

[85] 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.

[16] 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".

[14] 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".

"[84] Expanding on Levine and Dolan's points, Atwood Magazine's Josh Weiner said that the repeated delays had not dated the record's musical qualities while recent events in the world had "rendered it an especially powerful and timely release", particularly in the case of the last two songs.

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".

[87] 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".

[82] 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.