The Key is the eighth studio album by the British singer-songwriter Joan Armatrading, released on 28 February 1983 by A&M Records (AMLX64912).

[5] She went away and wrote the tracks "Drop the Pilot" and "What Do Boys Dream", both of which were produced separately in New York by Val Garay.

"(I Love It When You) Call Me Names" was written about two men in a band who were always arguing,[8] and features a guitar solo by Adrian Belew.

[11] Debra Rae Cohen, writing in The New York Times, said that the album's songs "dwell on the underlying truths and unadmitted paradoxes of love, of independence, and the area where they overlap and struggle", that Armatrading "shows a new control in her arrangements", the album being "one more step in Miss Armatrading's continual journey" and that The Key should help her to "become a household name".

[12] Rolling Stone's Don Shewey, however, disapproved of the album's commercial approach, commenting that, "For more than ten years, Armatrading has remained a commercially marginal cult figure, and on The Key, she seems to have decided to part with the one thing standing between her and success: her originality.

And both her dramatic monologues and her love songs traffic in the kind of musical and lyrical clichés she previously has always avoided or transcended."

He singled out "Call Me Names" and "The Key" as the only two standout tracks on the album, and gave it two and a half out of five stars.

[13] Martin C. Strong noted in The Great Rock Discography that the album was "well received" and represented one of Armatrading's "sole sojourns into the American Top 40".