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      ‘Renaissance’ Review: America Has a Problem and Beyoncé Ain’t It

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      On “Renaissance,” the pop star’s seventh solo album, she finds escape, rebirth, community, pleasure and control in decades of dance music steeped in Black queer bravado.It’s too much, this being alive. Too heavy, too uncertain, too chronically cataclysmic, too bellicose, too unwell, too freighted with a possibility of the perception of error. The word of the last few years — in American activist and academic circles, anyway — has been “precarity.” Which gets at ideas of endangerment, neglect, contingency, risk. Basically: We’re worried. And: We’re worried you’re not worried enough. Like I said: It’s too much.If I were a globally famous musician whose every blink gets inspected for Meaning, now might be the time to discover how it feels to mean something else, to seem lighter, to float, to bob, splash, writhe and grind, to sashay-shanté. To find “new salvation” in building her “own foundation.”Were I that musician, now might be the time to call my freestyle jam “America Has a Problem” and not say what the problem is because A) Psych! B) What I’ma say you don’t already know? And C) The person actually performing this song knows “that booty gon’ do what it want to.” Now’s the time to work your body in lieu of losing more of your mind. “America” is one of the closing tracks on “Renaissance,” Beyoncé’s seventh solo studio album, the one where she surveys the stakes and concludes they’re too damn high. Now’s the time to remind yourself — to be “telling everybody,” as she sings on the first single, “Break My Soul” — that there’s no discourse without disco.What a good time this thing is. All 16 songs hail from someplace with a dance floor — night clubs, strip clubs, ballrooms, basements, Tatooine. Most of them are steeped in or conducted entirely with Black queer bravado. And on nearly every one, Beyoncé sounds like she’s experiencing something personally new and privately glorious: unmitigated ecstasy. It takes different forms: bliss, obviously; but a sexy sternness, too. The exercise of control is as entertaining on this album as the exorcism of stress.As expensive, production-wise, as “Renaissance” sounds (one song credits two dozen writers, including samples and interpolations), Beyoncé’s singing here transcends any price tag. The range of her voice nears the galactic; the imagination powering it qualifies as cinema. She coos, she growls, she snarls, she doubles and triples herself. Butter, mustard, foie gras, the perfect ratio of icing to cupcake.At about the halfway point, something arrives called “Plastic Off the Sofa.” Now, part of me wept because those are words she doesn’t even bother to sing. Plastic off the sofa? Got you again! The rest of me wept because the singing she does do — in waves of rhapsodically long, Olympic-level emissions — seems to emanate from somewhere way beyond a human throat: The ocean? The oven? But this is one of the few songs that sound recorded with live instruments — plinking guitar and some pitter-pat percussion. (The musical plastic comes off the album’s sofa.) The bass line keeps swelling and curving and blooming till it outgrows its flower bed, and Beyoncé’s voice does, too. It surfs the swells. It smells the roses. “Renaissance” turns to gospel here and there — on “Church Girl,” most brazenly. This is the only one that sounds like it was recorded in Eden.It takes a minute for all the rapture on “Renaissance” to kick in. First comes a mission statement (“I’m That Girl”) wherein Beyoncé warns that love is her drug. Then it’s on to “Cozy,” an in-the-making anthem about Black femmes luxuriating in their skin. This one has a bottom as heavy as a cast-iron skillet and a bounce the Richter scale couldn’t ignore. “Cozy” is about comfort but sounds like an oncoming army. The first true exhalation is “Cuff It,” a roller-skate jam held aloft by Nile Rodgers’s signature guitar flutter while a fleet of horns offer afterburn. Here, Beyoncé wants to go out and have an unprintably good time. And it’s contagious enough to overthink a throwaway line like “I wanna go missing” later, when I’m sober.Comedy abounds. Thank the sampled contributions of Big Freedia and Ts Madison for that. “Dark skin, light skin, beige” — Madison drawls on “Cozy” — “fluorescent beige.” Thank the tabloid-TV keyboard blasts on “America Has a Problem.” But Beyoncé herself has never been funnier than she is here. The sternness she applies to the word “No” on “America” alone would be enough. But there’s her impersonation of Grace Jones’s imperiousness on “Move,” some sharp-elbowed dancehall refraction in which the two of them command the plebes to “part like the Red Sea” when the queen comes through. (Here’s me not touching who the queen is in that scenario.) Pop music has been tattooed with Jones’s influence for 45 years. This is one of the few mainstream acknowledgments of her bounteous musical might. There’s also Beyoncé’s vamp at the end of “Heated,” which she recites to the crack of a splayed hand fan. It’s one of those round-table freestyles that go down at some balls. A fraction of hers includes: “Unnncle Jonny made my dress/That cheap spandex/She looks a mess.”This is an album whose big idea is house. And its sense of house is enormous. It’s mansion music. “Renaissance” is adjacent to where pop’s been: pulsing and throbbing. Its muscles are larger, its limbs flexier, its ego secure. I don’t hear marketplace concerns. Its sense of adventure is off the genre’s map, yet very much aware of every coordinate. It’s an achievement of synthesis that never sounds slavish or synthetic. These songs are testing this music, celebrating how capacious it is, how pliable. That might be why I like “Break My Soul” so much. It’s Track 6, but it feels like the album’s thematic spine. It’s got tenderness, resolve and ideas — Beyoncé brokering two different approaches to church.On “Pure/Honey” Beyoncé breaks through wall after wall until she gets to the chamber that holds all the cousins of her 2013 sizzler “Blow.” It ends with her lilting next to a sample of the drag artist Moi Renee bellowing, “Miss Honey? Miss Honey!” And it’s as close to the B-52’s as a Beyoncé song might ever come. (But Kate, Cindy, Fred, Keith: Call her anyway!)The album’s embrace of house and not, say, trap unambiguously aligns Beyoncé with queer Black folks. On the one hand, that means she’s simply an elite pop star with particularly avid support. But “Renaissance” is more than fan service. It’s oriented toward certain histories. The knotty symbiosis between cis women and gay men is one. The doors of impersonation and tribute revolve with centrifugal force.With Beyoncé, her drag seems liberating rather than obfuscating. It’s not just these lesser-known gay and trans artists and personalities her music has absorbed. It’s other artists. On “Blow,” Beyoncé wondered how it felt for her partner when he made love to her. Now the wonder is: How does it feel for her to make love — and art — sometimes as somebody else? The album’s final song is “Summer Renaissance,” and it opens with the thrum of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.” It’s not the first time she’s quoted La Donna. But the nod is not only there, where the reference is explicit. It’s in the album’s rich middle, which includes that sofa song and “Virgo’s Groove,” maybe the most luscious track Beyoncé’s ever recorded. This is to say that “Renaissance” is an album about performance — of other pop’s past, but ultimately of Beyoncé, a star who’s now 40, an age when the real risk is in acting like you’ve got nothing to lose.Another history is right there in the album’s title: 100 years ago, when things were also too much for Black Americans — lynchings, “race riots” all over the country — and flight north from the South seemed like a sound alternative to murder, up in Harlem, Alain Locke and Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes and Aaron Douglas and Jessie Fauset, to pick five figures, were at the center of an explosion of art that could be as frivolous, party-hearty and vulgar as some of what’s on this album. Its artists were gay and straight and whatever was in between. The point is they called that a renaissance, too. It sustained and delivered delight and provocation in spite of the surrounding crisis, it gave people looking for a house something that approximates home. New salvation, old foundation.Beyoncé“Renaissance”(Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia) More

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      A Guide to the Dance Music on Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’

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      Chicago house, hyperpop, classic ’70s disco: The pop star’s new album is a tour through some of the genre’s most well-known touchstones as well as more underground sounds.Beyoncé’s new album, “Renaissance,” is consciously steeped in dance-music history, cannily embracing decades of samples and sounds: the 1970s disco of Donna Summer and Chic, Jamaican dancehall, internet-speed hyperpop. She chose collaborators, references and even specific keyboard sounds that pay homage to club-land memories while making her own 21st-century statement. Here are some of the sources she celebrates, and an exploration of their significance.The album’s second and third tracks, “Cozy” and “Alien Superstar,” feature writing and production by the Chicago-born house-music D.J. and producer Honey Dijon. “Cozy” also includes a writing credit for Curtis Alan Jones, known as Cajmere or Green Velvet — one of Chicago house music’s greatest producers.That locale is key here. Chicago is house music’s birthplace, and Chicago house, in particular, often moves with a heavily pronounced swing, accentuated by octave-jumping staccato bass patterns. The canonical example is Adonis’s “No Way Back,” from 1986, and the bass line of “Cozy” plays like an inversion of it. The song is almost mnemonically recognizable as early Chicago house without simply sounding like homage.On “Alien Superstar,” the cadence of the hook (“I’m too classy for this world/Forever I’m that girl”) is credited to an interpolation of Right Said Fred’s dance-floor novelty smash “I’m Too Sexy.” Taylor Swift borrowed the same part (also with credit) on her 2017 track “Look What You Made Me Do,” and Drake sampled the 1992 song on “Way Too Sexy” from 2021.There’s another direct callback on “Cuff It”: The bass line is instantly recognizable as the progeny of Bernard Edwards’s monster riff from Chic’s “Good Times,” a No. 1 hit in 1979, and Edwards’s partner in Chic, Nile Rodgers, gets credit for writing and playing guitars here. (On bass and drums: Raphael Saadiq.) As Ken Barnes pointed out in his liner notes to “The Disco Years Vol. 4: Lost in Music,” a compilation on Rhino Records, rewriting Chic became a kind of national pastime during the early 1980s, not least via early hip-hop and post-disco R&B. This version of the one, two, three (rest) is as indebted to the many “Good Times” rewrites as the original: the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” and Vaughn Mason’s “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll,” for example.“Energy” features writing and production from Skrillex, an EDM-festival superstar through the early 2010s known for his drops — dramatic buildups that resolve into a fresh beat — but since his heyday, he’s largely worked behind the scenes. (See Justin Bieber’s 2015 smash “Where Are Ü Now,” which he made alongside Diplo.) “Energy” seems to operate on wires; it’s taut minimalism, with the supplest layering of sub-bass tones.The song also has writing credits for Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, the songwriting and production duo the Neptunes, known for their work with a wide swath of singers and rappers starting in the 1990s. On Thursday, before the release of “Renaissance,” the singer and songwriter Kelis spoke out on social media, saying those credits were for a sample of one of her songs (it turned out to be an interpolation of “Milkshake,” from 2003), and that she hadn’t given permission for its use. Kelis wasn’t a credited writer or producer on most of the early albums she made with the Neptunes, and didn’t have credits on “Milkshake.” In a 2020 interview with The Guardian she said she had signed an agreement with the duo when she “was too young and too stupid to double-check it.”A similar situation arose with the album’s lead single, “Break My Soul,” which is indebted to the central Korg motif from Robin S.’s pop-house hit “Show Me Love.” But whether her 1992 remix was sampled was initially unclear, and for the first week of the song’s release, the credits shifted. (The latest version says the Beyoncé song “contains elements” of “Show Me Love.”) The Robin S. song’s afterlife has been robust: Its riff showed up in the Brooklyn producer AceMo’s 2019 “Where They At???” featuring John FM, which became a key underground dance anthem before and during the pandemic, as well as in recent releases from Charli XCX and Daddy Yankee.Another key to “Break My Soul” is the shouting of exhortations (“Release your wiggle!”) by the New Orleans bounce artist Big Freedia, whom Beyoncé had earlier sampled on “Formation” (2016). Bounce is a New Orleans-bred dance-music style that’s dizzyingly fast, bass intensive and heavy on call and response; twerking emerged in response to it.Beyoncé glances back to the late ’90s again on “Plastic Off the Sofa.” While the bulk of the song is lush digital balladry, there’s a moment in its coda that could have come from “glitch” experimental-electronica, where the tail end of a vocal run, heavily overdubbed, is subjected to a deliberately audible edit. It’s a hair jarring but mostly humorous — an audible wink to the listener, one facet of modern pop’s high-tech production laid bare. (For an example from the ’90s, see Oval’s album “94diskont,” or the compilation “Clicks + Cuts,” released in 2000.)Classic disco asserts itself at the album’s midway point. “Virgo’s Groove” features layers of undulating percussion, synthesizer and bass that updates the production work Quincy Jones did with Michael Jackson — a sort of companion piece to Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” “Move,” the next track, includes a feature from Grace Jones — disco royalty, just in case anyone wondered where Beyoncé may be coming from.Just as notable on “Move” — and even more noticeably on “America Has a Problem” — is the swarming low end known in the dance world as the “Reese bass.” The term is a reference to a 1988 record, “Just Want Another Chance” by Reese, one of many aliases used by Kevin Saunderson, one of the first producers identified with Detroit techno in the mid-80s.In much the same way that “Chicago house” refers not only to a style and its birthplace but also that swinging octave-hopping sound, “Detroit techno” tends to denote attention to detail and an aura of restless invention. The heavy-fog low end of “Just Want Another Chance” was often repurposed by London bass-music styles like jungle, drum & bass, U.K. garage and dubstep — what the writer Simon Reynolds has called the “hardcore continuum” of Black British musical styles from urban areas that took root on London pirate radio.Beyoncé’s use of the heavy, undulant Reese bass on “Move” and “America Has a Problem” further locates the album in the Black dance-music continuum. “Problem” also opens with orchestral stabs, à la Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force’s landmark electronic-rap track “Planet Rock” — or, even more aptly given the title and lyrical theme, Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation.”“Heated” features Beyoncé in commanding neo-dancehall form over a slinky, wood-block-heavy groove. At the end of the song, she mentions tapping out tracks with her fingers on the MPC, an instrument designed by Roger Linn that arrived in 1988. The MPC, made by Akai, isn’t played with a keyboard, but instead features a square grid of pads that trigger different sounds, and it has become a widespread compositional and performance tool.“Thique” sounds like something that would have been all over dubstep dance floors in the days before Skrillex, when the subgenre’s distended bass and variable tempos were primarily the province of British producers. Sure enough, the song’s writing and production credits include an artist influenced by those musicians: Chauncey Hollis Jr., a.k.a. Hit-Boy, who produced a dubstep-inflected hit on Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Watch the Throne” (2011).The Plasticine sounds of “Thique” segue into the even more heavily synthetic “All Up in Your Mind,” co-produced by A.G. Cook, the main mind behind the London label and art collective PC Music, which arrived in the mid-2010s with a sound built on stylish exaggeration: tones that weren’t just high in a machine-music way, but deliberately squeaky. (Sophie, the producer known for exhilarating hyperpop who died in 2021, came from this camp.) “All Up” is futurist robo-pop, with a sub-bass line that seems to be snorkeling under the speakers rather than emanating from them.“Pure/Honey,” next to last, is another sub-bass monster: The first part, propelled by a nasty kick drum, is a surprising approximation of techno at its steeliest, or maybe its most “pure.” The “honey” comes at the 2:11 mark, a bulbous neo-disco groove with feathery horns that recalls early Sylvester. The track runs in part off a sample of a Kevin Aviance song subtitled “The Feeling” — one of the key recordings in a queer house sub-style known as “bitch tracks.”The album’s final track, “Summer Renaissance,” features Beyoncé singing, “It’s so good, it’s so good, it’s so good, it’s sooooo good” over a very familiar pinballing riff — yes, the finale interpolates Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” the 1977 disco hit with an all-synthesizer backdrop and pulsating rhythm that anticipated the future sound of dance music. But the main melodic phrase from “I Feel Love” sounds like it’s being played on the Korg keyboard that anchors “Break My Soul,” subtly tying two eras together in a third one. More

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      Beyoncé Unveils ‘Renaissance,’ the First of Three New Projects

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      The pop star’s seventh solo album is “Act I” of work born during the pandemic, a time she “found to be the most creative,” she said in a statement.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 two days early online.Beyoncé acknowledged the hitch in a statement upon the album’s wide release on streaming services at midnight on Friday. “So, the album leaked, and you all actually waited until the proper release time so you all can enjoy it together,” she wrote to her dedicated 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 oddly conventional. After years of ripping up the standard playbook for releasing new music — eschewing early radio singles and interviews for surprise drops and elaborate multimedia spectacles — Beyoncé spent six weeks beating the promotional drum. She announced the album more than a month ahead of time, did an interview with British Vogue, put out the single “Break My Soul,” revealed a track list and finally began posting on TikTok.Yet on Wednesday, about 36 hours before the appointed release time, high-quality copies of the album’s 16 tracks appeared online, spreading across social media even as Beyoncé’s most vigilant fans encouraged one another to hold out (and to tattletale on the bootleggers). “I appreciate you for calling out anyone that was trying to sneak into the club early,” Beyoncé wrote in her statement on social media as the album was released.Sleuthing observers speculated that the tracks may have come from copies of the CD that were being sold in some European stores early. In a perverse way, the old-fashioned leak of a blockbuster album seemed to fit the throwback theme of “Renaissance,” which throbs with the sound of dance music from across the decades.Referencing disco, funk, house, techno, bounce and more, the generally upbeat songs draw from a wide array of writers and producers, with some tracks crediting more than dozen people. In addition to reliable Beyoncé collaborators like The-Dream, Pharrell Williams, Hit-Boy and Drake, experimental songs like “Energy” and “All Up In Your Mind” also feature electronic producers including Skrillex, BloodPop and A.G. Cook of PC Music among their eclectic personnel.The samples and interpolations run the gamut as well, from the regional and esoteric to the indelible: “America Has a Problem” pulls from the Atlanta bass pioneer Kilo, while “Summer Renaissance,” the closing song, includes an interpolation of Donna Summer’s 1977 electro-disco classic “I Feel Love.” On “Move,” a feature from the cultural chameleon Grace Jones is paired with the rising Afrobeats star Tems; elsewhere, Beyoncé links the sounds of traditional Black music genres like soul and R&B with subcultures like ballroom vogueing.“I’m one of one/I’m number one/I’m the only one,” she intones on “Alien Superstar.” “Don’t even waste your time trying to compete with me/no one else in this world can think like me.”In an explanatory statement posted to Instagram last month that Beyoncé expanded on her website on Thursday, she said “Renaissance” was part of a “three act project” she recorded during the pandemic. She called the album, which she refers to as “Act I,” “a place to dream and to find escape during a scary time for the world.”Adding that she hoped the dance floor-focused tracks would inspire listeners to “release the wiggle,” she added: “My intention was to create a safe place, a place without judgment. A place to be free of perfectionism and overthinking. A place to scream, release, feel freedom.”Beyoncé also cited her late “Uncle Jonny,” whose battle with H.I.V. the singer has spoken about before, as an influence for the music and its historical ties to the L.G.B.T.Q. community.“He was my godmother and the first person to expose me to a lot of the music and culture that serve as an inspiration for this album,” she wrote. “Thank you to all of the pioneers who originate culture, to all of the fallen angels whose contributions have gone unrecognized for far too long.”Since “Lemonade” (2016), her last solo studio LP and accompanying film, Beyoncé has tided fans over with a number of ambitious in-between 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 a triumph — one that “reoriented her music, sidelining its connections to pop and framing it squarely in a lineage of Southern Black musical 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,” credited to the Carters. And in June 2020, at the height of national protests in wake of George Floyd’s murder, she released a song, “Black Parade,” with lines like “Put your fist up in the air, show Black love.”“Black Parade” took the Grammy Award the next year for best R&B performance, one of four prizes that night that brought Beyoncé’s career haul 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 film “King Richard,” a biopic about the father of Venus and Serena Williams.How the early leak will affect the commercial prospects of “Renaissance” 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 other artists today, took advance orders for physical copies of her album, which will count on the charts as soon as they are shipped — usually the week of release. On Beyoncé’s website, the four boxed sets of “Renaissance” and its limited-edition vinyl version are sold out. More

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      Beyoncé’s Anthem for the Unique, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Rosalía, Brian Eno, Robert Glasper and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Beyoncé, ‘Alien Superstar’Beyoncé’s seventh studio album, “Renaissance,” is a dazzling nightclub fantasia, a nimble, freewheeling journey through decades of dance music that feels almost Prince-like in its ambition. Sequenced seamlessly between the humid beats of “Cozy” and the immaculately produced disco throwback “Cuff It,” the Afrofuturistic “Alien Superstar” is a bold pop homage to ballroom culture and an embodiment of the escapist, self-celebratory ethos that courses throughout “Renaissance.” “Unique, that’s what you are,” Beyoncé intones from on high, “Stilettos kicking vintage crystal off the bar.” Grace Jones, who appears later in the album on the charismatic “Move,” certainly feels like a touchstone here, but in the album’s liner notes Beyoncé also shouts out the familial influence of her late Uncle Jonny, a queer Black man who, she writes, was “the first person to expose me to a lot of the music and the culture that serve as inspiration for this album.” The word unique becomes a motif throughout “Alien Superstar,” and in the song’s outro, a sampled speech from Barbara Ann Teer, the founder of Harlem’s National Black Theater, drives the point home, resonantly: “We dress a certain way, we walk a certain way, we talk a certain way, we paint a certain way, we make love a certain way. All of these things we do in a different, unique, specific way that is personally ours.” By the end of this song, it goes without saying: Same for Beyoncé. LINDSAY ZOLADZRosalía, ‘Despechá’Rosalía sounds aggressively unbothered on the studio version of “Despechá,” a fan favorite she’s been playing live on her Motomami World Tour. Influenced by Dominican merengue, “Despechá” is a quintessential summer jam, built around a buoyant piano riff and an insistent beat. There’s a current of defiance driving Rosalía’s vocals, though, as she attempts to shake off the memory of a disappointing lover on the dance floor: “Baby, no me llames,” she begins (“Baby, don’t call me). “Que yo estoy ocupá olvidando tus males” (“I’m busy forgetting your ills”). ZOLADZU.S. Girls, ‘So Typically Now’The music of Meg Remy’s ever-evolving project U.S. Girls has rarely sounded as sleek as it does on the synth-pop “So Typically Now,” which makes the satirical bite of its lyrics that much more surprising. “Brooklyn’s dead, and Kingston is booming,” Remy vamps on this cheeky critique of pandemic-era exodus, gentrification and rising housing costs. A thumping beat and a glossy sheen that’s somewhere between Robyn and Kylie Minogue provides the foundation for Remy’s social commentary, while sky-high backing vocals from Kyle Kidd take the track to the next level. “Gotta sell all my best,” Remy sings archly, “to buy more, not less.” ZOLADZRina Sawayama, ‘Hold the Girl’Orchestral anthem? Dance-floor thumper? Fingerpicked folk-pop ditty? Hyperpop twitcher? Choral affirmation? Rina Sawayama chooses all of the above on “Hold the Girl,” a vow to reconnect with her younger self — “Reach inside and hold her close/I won’t leave you on your own” — that flits from style to style, cheerfully claiming every one. JON PARELESRobert Glasper featuring Masego, ‘All Masks’Pandemic malaise and endurance are the foundation of “All Masks,” which looks back on years of “all masks, no smiles.” Over a murky, oozy track with synthesizer chords that climb patiently only to fall back to where they started, Masego sings about “Looking like you’re in disguise every day/Breathing my own breath.” “All Masks” comes from an expanded version of “Black Radio III” due this fall, continuing the keyboardist Robert Glasper’s decade-long series of “Black Radio” albums that merge R&B, hip-hop and jazz. A pensive, darting piano improvisation near the end of the song is a whiff of possibility amid the constraints. PARELESBrian Eno, ‘There Were Bells’“There Were Bells” is a threnody for planetary extinction from Brian Eno’s coming album, “Foreverandevernomore.” The LP, he has said, is about “our narrowing, precarious future,” and it returns to songs with lyrics and vocals after more than a decade of primarily instrumental and ambient works. “There Were Bells” begins with birdsong and floating, glimmering sustained tones. Eno croons, in what could be a lullaby or a dirge, about natural beauty, but then human destruction ensues; as the track deepens, darkens and thunders, he observes “storms and floods of blood,” until no one can escape: “In the end they all went the same way,” he sings, leaving an echoey void. PARELESRat Tally, ‘Prettier’Addy Harris, who records as Rat Tally, faces chronic depression in the elegantly heartsick “Prettier”: “Sorry, I’ve just been down for the past decade,” she sings, over fingerpicked guitar. “I always did think I’m prettier when I’m unhappy/So do you,” she adds, as synthesizers bubble up behind her. “When I drop, I plummet,” she sings — examining herself with cool compassion, wondering what could change. PARELESPlains, ‘Problem With It’Plains is a new group formed by Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield and the underrated singer-songwriter Jess Williamson — two Southern-born musicians who began their careers in the indie-rock world but whose more recent albums have reconnected with their country roots. Crutchfield and Williamson’s voices blend gorgeously on Plains’ hard-driving debut single “Problem With It,” which will appear on the forthcoming album “I Walked With You a Ways.” Crutchfield’s smoky twang takes center stage on the verses, but Williamson’s harmonies flesh out the chorus so that the lines land like bold, self-assured mantras: “If you can’t do better than that, babe, I got a problem with it.” ZOLADZAmaarae, ‘A Body, a Coffin’Amaarae, from Ghana, has an airborne, Auto-Tuned soprano in “A Body, a Coffin,” from an EP called “Wakanda Forever Prologue” that starts the rollout for the movie “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” A crisp, staccato Afrobeats rhythm track, a little flute lick and a swarm of now-you-hear-them, now-you-don’t computer-manipulated voices back her as she sings about facing deadly odds: “You was in danger/I needed a savior.” The track ends, in Marvel Cinematic Universe fashion, as a cliffhanger. PARELESPalm, ‘Feathers’Palm — formerly an indie-rock band that brandished jittery, asymmetrical, tangled guitars — has used its four years between albums to learn electronic instruments. “Feathers,” from an album due in October, reveals the band’s new mastery with a clanging, lurching, meter-shifting song that enjoys programmed, multitracked precision even as Eve Alpert sings about spontaneity. “Imma make it up as I go,” she lilts, and for all its premeditation, the song swings. PARELESBobby Krlic, ‘KJ’s Discovery’Bobby Krlic, who usually records as the Haxan Cloak, has composed the score for a new Amazon series, “Paper Girls,” and “KJ’s Discovery” is from its soundtrack album. It’s one-and-a-half minutes of aggressive six-beat and four-beat propulsion: drums and gongs interwoven with electronic blips and throbs, like an ominous, time-warped gamelan. PARELES More

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      Is Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ Rollout (Gasp!) Conventional?

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      The singer, who has prioritized innovation over commercial domination, has opted for a more standard playbook ahead of her seventh solo album, “Renaissance,” out Friday.An upbeat lead single ready for radio. An album title and release date with plenty of notice. A magazine cover story, followed by a personal mission statement, a fresh social media account, a detailed track list and a merchandise pre-sale.For most musicians, these are time-honored bullet points in the playbook for introducing a major new album. But for Beyoncé, who has spent the last decade-plus upending all conventions about how to market music, the rollout of “Renaissance,” her latest album due out Friday, is a striking shift — and perhaps a tacit acknowledgment that the game has changed.Before “Renaissance,” Beyoncé’s seventh solo studio album, the last time the singer participated in such industry-standard baby steps, with “4” in 2011, President Barack Obama was still in his first term and a European music start-up called Spotify was just arriving in the United States. Since then, there hasn’t been much about the formula for selling new music that Beyoncé hasn’t tweaked, disrupted or dismantled altogether.First there was “Beyoncé,” the paradigm-shifting surprise “visual album” from 2013. Then came “Lemonade” (2016), an allusion-packed tour de force that arrived with more mystery as a film on cable television. By partnering closely with Tidal, the streaming service then controlled by her husband, Jay-Z, and with media behemoths like HBO, Disney and Netflix, Beyoncé has positioned one ambitious multimedia project after another as something to be sought out and carefully considered, rather than served up for easy access and maximum consumption.That work, and the innovative way she has released it, has helped Beyoncé skyrocket in artistic stature. Yet it has also served to distance the singer somewhat from the pop-music mainstream, siloing her material — the “Lemonade” album wasn’t widely available on major streaming platforms until three years after its initial release, while its full film is currently available only on Tidal — and potentially hamstringing her commercial performance.Beyoncé’s last No. 1 single as a lead artist, “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” came in late 2008. Despite the fact that her 28 Grammy Awards make her the winningest woman in music, she has not taken a trophy in a major category since 2010. Radio play for her new solo releases has dipped significantly since “4.” And while her six solo albums have all gone to No. 1, in-between projects like “Everything Is Love” (a surprise joint album with Jay-Z), the “Lion King” soundtrack and her concert album “Homecoming” have each failed to reach the top.Still, the paradox of Beyoncé has meant that even as she has slipped somewhat on the charts, her larger cultural prestige has remained supreme, driven by the mystique and grandeur she brings to each project. (“My success can’t be quantified,” she rapped on “Nice,” from 2018, sneering at the importance of “streaming numbers.”)“She’s still the leader of the culture, regardless of relatively minor data points in her world like album sales and radio play,” said Danyel Smith, the veteran music journalist and author of the recent “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop.”“There are people that exist in this world to shift the culture, to shift the vibe,” she said in an interview. “It matters to some degree, the singles or the albums or radio play, but what really matters is that they make us look in a new direction.”From the start, however, the rollout of “Renaissance” has been different — more transparent, more conventional. Described by Beyoncé, 40, in an Instagram post last month as “a place to be free of perfectionism and overthinking,” the album is being positioned for mass consumer awareness and fan excitement, with four different boxed sets and a limited-edition vinyl version having already sold out on the singer’s website.“She and her representation are recognizing that things have changed since her last album release, and she has to go full-court press,” said Rob Jonas, the chief executive of Luminate, the music data service behind the Billboard charts.One major risk of the old-fashioned release strategy — which requires physical copies of the album to be produced far in advance — came to pass on Wednesday, when “Renaissance” appeared to leak in full online. Fan accounts on social media speculated that the early, unofficial version could have come from CDs that had been sold prematurely in Europe.Right away, Beyoncé’s famously protective base, known as the BeyHive, leaped into action, seeking to discourage early listens and band together to report those spreading the bootleg.While advance leaks of major albums were common as the CD era gave way to digital downloads, and could devastate a new album’s prospects, a crackdown on digital piracy and the shift to a streaming-first model — along with surprise releases like Beyoncé’s — have greatly reduced that threat.The last time Beyoncé suffered a major leak was with “4” in 2011, when she told listeners, “While this is not how I wanted to present my new songs, I appreciate the positive response from my fans.” (Representatives for Beyoncé and her label declined to comment on her release strategy, and did not immediately respond to questions about the leak.)Behind the scenes, the luxury of having advance notice and — hallelujah! — an early promotional single can give industry gatekeepers, like radio stations and streaming services, the runway to get themselves involved before an album’s launch.“To have anything prior to the drop is a gift,” said Michael Martin, a senior vice president of programming at Audacy, which runs more than 230 radio stations around the country. “When you have time to prepare, you can be a better marketing partner with the artist and label and management. You can have everything ready to push out at the moment the project hits the ecosystem. That’s what you want. You don’t want to scramble.”“Break My Soul,” a throwback to 1990s dance music and the first single from “Renaissance,” was released more than a month ago. With 57 million streams and 61,000 radio spins in the United States, according to Luminate, the song currently sits at No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 — its peak thus far and only the third time Beyoncé has hit the Top 10 in the last decade as a principal artist. (Her two most recent chart-toppers came as a guest: “Perfect Duet” with Ed Sheeran, in 2017, and “Savage Remix” with Megan Thee Stallion, in 2020.)Yet as with most things Beyoncé, the commercial and the artistic can work hand-in-hand. Smith said that the preparations for the release of “Renaissance” matched its teased vintage touchstones — for example, the special attention paid to the album’s elaborate vinyl packaging, which has once again become a fixture of big-tent pop releases.“Once I realized that Beyoncé was reaching back a bit, musically and artistically, with her sound and her allusions, then the rollout began to make sense to me,” Smith said. “It’s all very meta.”Another recent key development is Beyoncé’s arrival on TikTok, the home of bite-size, shareable videos that has been one of the most reliable drivers of music hits for at least three years now, as well as a go-to hype platform for younger stars like Lizzo and Cardi B.This month, Beyoncé’s official account posted its first TikToks — a montage of fans, including Cardi, dancing to “Break My Soul,” followed by the vinyl artwork reveal for “Renaissance” — and the singer recently made her entire music catalog available to score user-generated videos on the platform.Short-form videos drive “massive awareness and downstream consumption,” said Jonas, of Luminate. “We’ve got a clear line of sight on that.” Even before her participation, Beyoncé songs like “Savage Remix” and “Yoncé” thrived on TikTok.Whether or not the straightforward release of “Renaissance” represents a return to total pop domination for Beyoncé, there is still the chance that she has more moves to make. The album, after all, has been teased by the singer as “Act I,” indicating that it could be just a piece of a larger project.“It all feels a little bit too much like she’s playing by the rules right now,” Jonas said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some twist that we are not aware of yet.”Part of Beyoncé’s cultural mastery, Smith said, has included the ability to make herself scarce at some moments and then to once again become center of everything when she chooses. “At this point, she allows air to others, but it’s at her whim, as she sees fit,” Smith said. “Her overall impact — how she moves, what she wears — is unmatched.”She added, “I believe if Beyoncé woke up and decided, at the age of 42, 45 or 50, that she wanted to rule the culture across all data points and impact then she could — like Cher before her, like Tina Turner before her — really without breaking a sweat.” More

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      Hong Kong: Mirror Concert Accident to Be Investigated

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      Two dancers for the popular boy band were hospitalized, a local news outlet reported. Hong Kong officials promised an investigation.The Hong Kong authorities will investigate why a large, heavy video screen fell from the ceiling during a concert by a popular boy band at a government-run venue, injuring two dancers, officials said on Friday.The accident happened during a performance on Thursday night by Mirror, a 12-member band in the Chinese territory whose popularity has grown during the coronavirus pandemic. In footage from the concert at the Hong Kong Coliseum, audience members scream after the video screen lands directly on one dancer, edge-down, apparently striking his neck. The South China Morning Post newspaper later reported that one of the two male dancers had suffered neck injuries and was in intensive care. It said the other was in stable condition.Kevin Yeung Yun-hung, Hong Kong’s secretary for culture, sports and tourism, told reporters on Friday that one of the screen’s suspension cables had broken. Each of the screens for the venue’s four-sided projection system measures 5 meters by 3.9 meters, or 210 square feet, according to the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, which manages the coliseum. Emergency workers treated the injured dancers. Vivian/Associated PressJohn Lee, Hong Kong’s chief executive, said in a statement early Friday that he had asked the leisure department and other agencies to investigate the accident and “review the safety requirements of similar performance activities.”“I am shocked by the incident,” Mr. Lee said. “I express sympathy to those who were injured and hope that they would recover soon.”The Hong Kong authorities said in a separate statement that the government had contacted the concert organizers on Wednesday — the day before the accident — about “stage incidents in the past few days.” It did not elaborate, and the leisure department could not immediately be reached for comment.On Tuesday, a member of Mirror, Frankie Chan Sui-fai, fell off the stage at the Hong Kong Coliseum during the second day of the band’s scheduled 12-day series of concerts, The South China Morning Post reported. He fell about a meter and was not seriously hurt, according to the report.Makerville, the concert organizer, apologized for the Thursday night accident in an Instagram post early Friday, adding that Mirror’s remaining concerts at the venue would be canceled. The band’s management did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mirror, which draws on K-pop as an influence, formed in 2018 through a reality show designed to manufacture a hit boy band. Its members sing in Cantonese, a Chinese language spoken widely in the former British colony. The band’s escapist lyrics have been a balm of sorts for an anxious population during a tumultuous period of Hong Kong history.In 2019, the city was consumed by months of mass protests triggered by a proposed law to allow extraditions to mainland China. Then came a thicket of pandemic-related restrictions that have battered Hong Kong’s economy, as well as a sweeping national security law that has curtailed freedoms with breathtaking speed.Mirror’s popularity soared as Hong Kong struggled. The band sold out concert halls, accounting for some of the city’s only large-scale events during the pandemic. Its members’ faces have been plastered on billboards, buses and subway ads.The coliseum where Mirror was performing on Thursday opened in 1983, according to the leisure department’s website. It seats about 12,500 people, the site says, and meets local demand for a “world class indoor stadium.”Zixu Wang More

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      Lizzo’s Complicated, Joyful Pop

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherLizzo’s second major-label studio album, “Special,” another collection of up-tempo disco-pop empowerment anthems, just arrived at No. 2 on the Billboard album chart. Its single “About Damn Time” also climbed to No. 1 on the Hot 100, securing her place as one of pop’s established stars.But “Special” is also a reminder that she is one of pop’s most idiosyncratic performers, too. Lizzo’s throwback-minded anthems are full of internet-primed catchphrases, and she remains a peppy outlier in a pop music landscape dominated by performers who largely traffic in melancholy, not joy.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Lizzo’s career, her relationship with empowerment culture and optimism in pop music. Also, a segment celebrating the life of the classical music scholar Richard Taruskin, who recently passed away.Guests:Justin Charity, senior staff writer at The Ringer and co-host of the Sound Only podcastLindsay Zoladz, who writes about music for The New York Times and othersWilliam Robin, an associate professor of musicology at University of Maryland, College ParkConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      What Is Beyoncé’s Definitive Album?

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      With the superstar’s seventh solo studio album, “Renaissance,” due Friday, our critics and reporters debate which work from her past reveals the most about her artistic vision.Much is made of pop star “eras” these days, but the term is deployed as a tool of marketing, not meaning. Rare is the artist who can sustain multiple visions and repeatedly regenerate. But different cultural and social moments have demanded different Beyoncés, and she has consistently delivered. At times she has been a singles powerhouse, dominating the radio and pop charts. At others, she has announced herself as a seismic cultural force, playing on a field much bigger than music. On Friday she will release “Renaissance,” her seventh solo studio album. Below, eight New York Times critics and reporters choose what they believe to be her definitive album so far, the one that reveals the most truth about the scope and shape of her career.‘B’Day’ (2006)Beyoncé’s second solo album opens with “Déjà Vu,” and “bass” is the first thing we hear her say. So up rumbles the most bootylicious bottom. The second is “hi-hat.” And a slapping sizzle ensues. But I don’t know who’s at the kit, ’cause that ain’t what no regular cymbals sound like when you slap ’em. These ones here? They make a sick drag. They double-dutchin’.That’s the time signature for at least the first half of this album: two rope turners and a jumper. “B’Day” arrived in 2006 just before Labor Day. And the whole thing — minus two of the last three ballads — is wet with the nectar of a wrenched-open fire hydrant.“Déjà Vu” spreads into “Get Me Bodied,” which hops to “Suga Mama” then “Upgrade U” and “Ring the Alarm,” which leads to “Kitty Kat,” “Freakum Dress” and “Green Light.” Different rooms on Single Ladies Night at the biggest club in Stankonia. It slinks and struts. This album’s the one that culminates with the ninth track (of an efficient 12): That would be “Irreplaceable,” the “Wanted Dead or Alive” of “better call Tyrone” balladry.“B’Day” doesn’t have the split-persona nerve of “Sasha Fierce” or that damn-the-charts idiosyncrasy of “4,” the first of her masterwork trio. It’s a parade of bangers about lust and its discontents, about how to take a nightspot over with Naomi Campbell’s walk. Her singing hadn’t yet gone through the puberty of playing Etta James. And yes, Jay-Z’s two appearances still sound like a formula replicated rather than a partnership forged. And do I know why she’s been photographed for the cover to evoke Brigitte Bardot if Bardot missed the last train out of Stepford? I really don’t.What’s essential about it, though, is its author’s determination to have it be more than some pop singer’s next album. Beyoncé angles for the synths and drum machines to frolic with all the horns, Latin percussion and credited use of a ney. She all but resorts to violence and makes funnies (“pat-pat-pat your weave, ladies”). I remember hearing these songs for the first time and feeling as slinky and swaggering as this music. I also remember laughing. With respect. I mean, she went and called the thing “B’Day,” like a star who knows she was born. WESLEY MORRIS‘I Am … Sasha Fierce’ (2008)Before Beyoncé’s third solo LP, she was a girl-group standout. She was a master of the cadences where early 2000s R&B met hip-hop. She was a sturdy practitioner of the ballad, the soulful throwback, the dancey throwdown. But on “I Am … Sasha Fierce,” she became something more significant: a character.Sasha Fierce was the name of an alter ego Beyoncé created over the years “whenever I have to perform,” she told Oprah Winfrey in 2008. It was her stage persona; the fearless, brash pop queen in the leotard, not the demure mortal on the host’s couch, gamely discussing her work — something Beyoncé would stop doing once fierceness transformed from an onstage mood into her default public presentation. Beyoncé seizing control of how her music is released, commandeering a girl army in a dusty apocalyptic wasteland, leading a squadron of dancers on the Super Bowl halftime field, transforming a music festival into a personal showcase, redefining her relationship with her husband on a joint album, controlling her image on Instagram — all of that springs from the absorption of Sasha Fierce into Beyoncé.The music on “I Am … Sasha Fierce” was divided in half: eight ballads where Beyoncé unfurled elegant, virtuosic vocals, and eight uptempos delivered with snarls and grit. Sasha Fierce’s arrival was cemented on “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” where she became a defiant spokeswoman for the spurned. Gender dynamics dominated the album’s most interesting tracks, including “If I Were a Boy,” where Beyoncé imagined the freedom she’d enjoy if she’d been entitled to the casual power of manhood, and “Diva,” where she redefined a feminine archetype as a masculine, streetwise pose.But the album’s true pivot point may have been “Video Phone,” an almost atonal, grindy track Beyoncé rereleased as a remix with Lady Gaga, then pop’s most adventurous star; Beyoncé repaid the favor with an appearance on “Telephone” that let her be astonishingly, gloriously weird. Over the past few years, they’ve nearly swapped careers: Gaga has become the traditionalist, and Beyoncé the explorer. CARYN GANZ‘4’ (2011)Even Beyoncé had to pull back and re-center before exploding outward again. In between the complementary bombast of “I Am … Sasha Fierce” and “Beyoncé,” following a split with her manager-father and something of a creative hiatus, came the relatively subdued “4,” the first album released via the singer’s all-purpose entertainment company, Parkwood.That Beyoncé chose, in this moment of renewal and self-determination, to wrap herself in the warmth of traditional soul and R&B was telling, and it paid off in the strength of her vocal performances, which rank among her best even on the album’s inconsistent array of ballads. Opening the original track list with “1+1,” possibly her barest emotional showing, seemed at the time like a play for seriousness, and unlike most pop stars staring down their perceived frivolity, it actually worked: Even as “4” remains the least commercially successful of Beyoncé’s solo albums, it feels like the pivot moment in which she came to be perceived as an auteurist, capital-A album artist, timeless and often untouchable. Stripping down well can do that.Yet “4” also contains some of the most enduringly crowd-pleasing Beyoncé singles (“Love on Top,” “Countdown,” “Party”), plus her best bonus track (“Schoolin’ Life”), with the production and writing duo The-Dream and Tricky Stewart, consistent collaborators throughout the singer’s various eras, operating at the height of their powers. (Even the album’s lead single, “Run the World (Girls),” which doesn’t quite fit and was originally tacked onto the end of the track list, provides the best peek at the self-titled moment to come.) Pure Beyoncé, tight at just 12 official tracks but with plenty of all of the things she does best, “4” is an amuse bouche and a palate cleanser that ends up being better than most meals. JOE COSCARELLI‘Beyoncé’ (2013)When a musician’s fifth album is self-titled, it can be a sign of empty gimmickry or a lack of ideas. But “Beyoncé” marked her full transformation into the star we have known ever since: an artist whose true medium is fame, who cannot be limited to any format, who bends the world to her will.At midnight on Dec. 13, 2013, Beyoncé posted “Surprise!” on Instagram, and the album’s 14 songs and 17 videos appeared for sale on iTunes. The stealth release — back then, partly a defensive strategy against leaks — is what mostly captured public imagination. But in retrospect, “Beyoncé” comes across as a broader manifesto about Beyoncé as a performer and a human being. It’s all about containing multitudes, and looking fabulous doing so. Songs like “Flawless” and “Pretty Hurts” (“We shine the light on whatever’s worst”) position her as a paradox, both perfect and imperfect, a deity who is kinda-sorta relatable.Yet “Beyoncé” also marked the point at which mere music seemed insufficient for her. Beyoncé’s true project was on a bigger canvas, one centered on her image and her potency as a 21st-century media celebrity. The music videos that were part of the original “visual album” — now best viewed as a YouTube playlist — are essential to the story she tells. That narrative touches on the meaning of feminism (with a place for lap dancing), monogamy and Black identity; the video for “Superpower” even includes a Black Lives Matter-style protest scene with Beyoncé in camouflage and fishnets.Mostly, though, the story adds up to Beyoncé’s majesty, with music just one jewel in the crown. BEN SISARIO‘Lemonade’ (2016)On “Lemonade,” Beyoncé merged a message of solidarity with a cry from the heart. The second of Beyoncé’s visual albums, “Lemonade” mustered lavish musical and filmic resources to expand an individual story — the fury of a betrayed wife — toward a recognition of how many kinds of injustice, personal and historical, that women have endured, particularly Black women.The songs easily stood up on their own, slipping sonic experimentation and an eerie sense of space into sturdy pop structures. Beyoncé both collaborated widely and drew samples from across genres and eras: Kendrick Lamar, the Weeknd, James Blake, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Led Zeppelin, Animal Collective. She hurled raspy imprecations in “Hurt Yourself” and let her voice break with tearful desperation and then find its own resolve in the hymnlike “Sandcastles.” She claimed Texas country with “Daddy Lessons,” electronica with “Sorry” and marching-band unity in “Freedom.”The album’s lyrics continued Beyoncé’s career-long stance of self-determination, but they also admitted to pain and bewilderment. Heard as a whole, “Lemonade” created a narrative of one couple’s fracture, separation and, amazingly, reconciliation, with a postscript — “Formation” — that posited Beyoncé’s success as the spearhead of a movement.Then the visual album multiplied the songs’ implications. Beyoncé recited poems by Warshan Shire that saw women’s pain as not only individual but archetypal. She showed images of women of all ages and multiple eras — in plantation dresses, African-style face paint, haute couture and streetwear — and of real parents mourning children shot by police. Onscreen, Beyoncé was singing not only for herself, but for all of them. JON PARELESI know exactly where I was when “Lemonade” dropped: at home mourning Prince’s death by listening to the obscure and familiar that is his oeuvre. Then Beyoncé’s most personal album arrived as an offering to her audience and her ancestors, an otherworldly gift that crossed histories, geographies and genres to help us all heal.She opened on a stage, then in a field while wearing a hoodie. With the haunting ballad “Pray You Catch Me” as its score, she was a stand-in for Trayvon Martin, tragically killed in Florida. And as her album’s tale unfolded, this insistence on not forgetting was underscored by the appearance of his mother, Sybrina Fulton; Eric Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr; and Michael Brown’s mother, Lezley McSpadden-Head; each holding photographs of their gone-to-soon sons. These were the album’s stakes — “Lemonade” was not about a woman scorned (though that might be there), but a work made in the struggle and for a people whose lives seem not to matter. So, yes, it is fair to say this was her movement album, but it is also her major album.Beyoncé had been experimenting with the video form for a minute; her 2013 self-titled album was a mix of styles, personas and declarations. But on “Lemonade,” she was at her most liberated — beyond the eye of her father or the gaze of her husband — and in the company of other Black women and girls with whom she found solace and salvation. And if that weren’t enough, Beyoncé was also settling scores and swinging baseball bats.To watch it for over an hour was to embark on an epic journey; to hear it was to witness her take on the American songbook. Her swift move from reggae (“Hold Up”) to rock (“Don’t Hurt Yourself”), from country (“Daddy Lessons”) to hip-hop (“Formation”), with so much soul and R&B in between (“Freedom,” anyone?) was not just a testament to her skill, but also her testifying about the innovative power of Black music and how it repeatedly makes American pop music, well, so popular. During that weekend in April 2016, Beyoncé not only gave us her genius, she moved a nation. SALAMISHAH TILLET‘Homecoming: The Live Album’ (2019)It’s not terribly controversial to call Beyoncé’s brilliant 2018 Coachella performance — excuse me, Beychella — one of the undisputed highlights in her career. So why does the 2019 live album “Homecoming” still feel strangely underrated? Even without the dazzling visuals, considered solely as a sonic document, the immaculately recorded “Homecoming” deserves to be mentioned alongside classics of the genre like the Who’s “Live at Leeds,” Sam Cooke’s “Live at the Harlem Square Club” and Talking Heads’ “Stop Making Sense.”Across nearly two hours, “Homecoming” becomes something more than a souvenir of the impressively calisthenic Beyoncé concert experience. It also works remarkably well as an unbroken piece of music, an expertly arranged 40-song medley that finds common moods and grooves throughout Beyoncé’s deep catalog — thanks in large part to the unifying presence of a drum line and marching band, recalling those of historically Black colleges and universities — and makes the case for her discography not as a disparate collection of eras and aesthetics but a vast continuum containing some of the century’s most forward-thinking pop music.A militantly commanding rendition of “Sorry” seamlessly shape-shifts into a slinky “Me, Myself and I”; “Don’t Hurt Yourself” segues into a transcendent version of its spiritual predecessor “I Care” (just in case Beyoncé needed to remind anyone that she’d been making scorched-earth breakup songs long before “Lemonade”); even her verse on the remix of J Balvin’s 2017 “Mi Gente” smash-cuts to her early, Sean Paul-featuring solo hit “Baby Boy,” subtly connecting the dots between the different decades of pop over which she’s reigned. By the time Beyoncé (and a crowd of about 100,000 screaming people) reaches the album’s pinnacle — an ecstatic mash-up of “Get Me Bodied” and “Single Ladies” — it’s hard to feel anything but sweat-drenched awe at the scope of what she’s just achieved. LINDSAY ZOLADZDestiny’s Child, ‘The Writing’s on the Wall’ (1999)Slight cheat here, but hear me out. Before “The Writing’s on the Wall,” released in 1999, Destiny’s Child was a promising R&B girl group with strong gospel roots. Its relatively straightforward 1998 debut album was good, sometimes very good. But the shift on “The Writing’s on the Wall” is palpable. It’s a wildly playful album, full of risky production and arrangements — skittering aquatic beats, odd filigrees, punchy power harmonies. To evolve their sound, Beyoncé (and her groupmates) opted to work with pop and soul progressives including Missy Elliott, Kevin (She’kspere) Briggs, Kandi Burruss and Rodney (Darkchild) Jerkins, all of whom were at the height of their powers. “Bills, Bills, Bills” is dizzyingly complex, “Jumpin’, Jumpin’” is futuristically forceful and Beyoncé’s singing at the end of “Bug a Boo” is a soaring interjection of traditional glory into the modish present.These collaborators used Destiny’s Child as a template for forward-thinking pop grounded in experimental soul music, and Beyoncé was paying close attention. Throughout her solo career, she’s excelled at finding ways of folding songwriting and production avantists into her vision, demonstrating a preternatural understanding of how unexpected gestures can deepen an artist’s vision, not distract from it. The long tail of that lesson stretches through her solo discography: “Upgrade U,” “Run the World (Girls),” “Partition,” “Get Me Bodied” and many, many more. JON CARAMANICA More