The new Beyoncé album has officially arrived. In a rare breach of the pop queen’s carefully choreographed release plans, an unauthorized version of “Renaissance,” the singer’s seventh solo studio LP and the first part of a teased trilogy, leaked online two days earlier.
Beyoncé acknowledged the hitch pronunciation upon the album’s wide release on streaming services at midnight on Friday. “So the album has been leaked and you’ve all been waiting for the right release time so you can all enjoy it together,” she wrote to her devoted fans. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she added, thanking her followers “for your love and protection.”
The debut of “Renaissance” followed a marketing rollout that, for Beyoncé, was strangely conventional. After years of tearing up the standard new music release script—avoiding early radio singles and interviews for surprise drops and extended multimedia spectacles—Beyoncé spent six weeks beating the promotional drum. She announced the album more than a month in advance, did an interview with British Voguedo the single “Break My Soul”, revealed a track list and finally started post on TikTok.
But on Wednesday, about 36 hours before the scheduled release time, high-quality copies of the album’s 16 tracks appeared online, spread across social media, even as Beyoncé’s most vigilant fans encouraged each other to hang on (and chat about the bootleggers). . “I appreciate you calling anyone who tried to sneak into the club,” Beyoncé wrote in her statement on social media when the album was released.
Sleuting observers speculated that the songs may have come from copies of the CD sold early in some European stores. In a perverse way, the old-fashioned leak of a blockbuster album seemed to fit the throwback theme of “Renaissance,” which matches the sound of dance music from decades past.
Referring to disco, funk, house, techno, bounce, and more, the generally upbeat songs come from a wide variety of writers and producers, with some songs exceeding a dozen people. In addition to trusted Beyoncé collaborators like The-Dream, Pharrell Williams, Hit-Boy and Drake, experimental tracks like “Energy” and “All Up In Your Mind” also feature electronic producers including Skrillex, BloodPop and AG Cook of PC Music. eclectic staff.
The samples and interpolations also run the gamut, from regional and esoteric to indelible: “America Has a Problem” is taken from Atlanta bass pioneer Kilo, while “Summer Renaissance,” the closing track, features an interpolation from Donna Summer’s 1977 electro-disco classic ” I Feel Love”. On “Move”, a feature of the cultural chameleon Grace Jones is linked to rising Afrobeats star Tems; elsewhere, Beyoncé links the sounds of traditional black music genres such as soul and R&B with subcultures such as ballroom vogueing.
“I’m one of the one / I’m the number one / I’m the only one,” she says in “Alien Superstar.” “Don’t even waste your time trying to compete with me / no one else in this world can think like me.”
in a explanatory statement posted on Instagram last month that Beyoncé was expanding on her website on Thursday, she said “Renaissance” was part of a “three-company project” she shot during the pandemic. She called the album, which she calls “Act I,” “a place to dream and escape in a scary time for the world.”
She added that she hoped the dancefloor-focused songs would inspire listeners to “let go of the wobbling”, adding: “My intention was to create a safe place, a place without judgment. A place to be free from perfectionism and overthink, a place to scream, let go, feel freedom.”
Beyoncé also quoted her late “Uncle Jonny”, whose battle with HIV has left the singer talked about beforeas an influence for the music and its historical ties to the LGBTQ community.
“He was my godmother and the first person to expose me to much of the music and culture that inspired this album,” she wrote. “Thank you to all the pioneers who brought forth the culture, to all the fallen angels whose contributions have gone unnoticed for far too long.”
Since “Lemonade” (2016), her latest solo studio LP and accompanying film, Beyoncé has showered fans with a number of ambitious interim projects.
In 2018, she performed as one of the headliners at the Coachella festival, where her show paid tribute to the marching band tradition of historically black colleges and universities, and was widely hailed as triumph — one that “refocused her music, sidelined its connections with pop, and squared it into a line of Southern Black music traditions,” as The New York Times critic Jon Caramanica wrote. The performance was later turned into a Netflix special and an album, both titled “Homecoming.”
Also in 2018, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, her husband, released a joint album, “Everything is love”, attributed to the Carters. And in June 2020, at the height of national protests following the murder of George Floyd, released a song, “Black Parade”, with lines like “Put your fist in the air, show black love.”
“Black Parade” won the Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance the following year, one of four prizes that evening that brought Beyoncé’s career to 28 — more than any other woman. This year, Beyoncé was nominated at the Academy Awards for Best Original Song for “Be Alive,” from the movie “King Richard,” a biopic about Venus’s father and Serena Williams.
How the early leak will affect “Renaissance” commercial prospects remains unclear. Years ago, the unauthorized release of music in advance could have devastating consequences for an album. But that danger has been mitigated by the shift to streaming.
And Beyoncé, like most artists today, took pre-orders for physical copies of her album, which will count on the charts as soon as they ship — usually the week of release. The four box sets of “Renaissance” and the limited edition vinyl version are sold out on Beyoncé’s website.