Beyoncé's Lemonade is her best album yet

Beyoncé Knowles-Carter has finally made the album that her talent has long threatened, a work of focussed brilliance that truly justifies her regal pop status.

Beyoncé, Lemonade review: Fiery, insurgent, fiercely proud, sprawling and sharply focused

Lemonade is fiery, insurgent, fiercely proud, sprawling and sharply focused in its dissatisfaction. Its dissatisfaction includes her husband’s alleged infidelities (one should remember that music is a representation of reality, not reality itself) and also perceived sexism. From the sound of Freedom and the closing so-is-everything-all-right-after-all? song All Night, Beyoncé is still fully in control of whatever happens around her. However the world dissolves around her, she is continuing her steps towards fully-fledged feminist and activist. Maybe it helps her sell records? Who cares when it results in music this tumultuous and inspirational?

When Beyoncé puts on a show, see who shows up

This is her second visual album, and Lemonade is best served with the visuals, a semi-autobiographical film with deft dream-logic, a Purple Rain for the internet age. Its waves wash over the political-commercial-aesthetic limits of Beyonce, which at the time of its release felt a generic/political revelation, but now seems watered-down compared to the bittersweet specificity and holler of Lemonade. Beyoncé reaches into her interiority, and the mythos that has been projected onto and over it, to emerge with a carefully calculated celebrity narrative and allegory for social uplift.

Lemonade is Beyoncé at her most profane, political and personal

Lemonade is by far Beyoncé’s strongest album. It features guest appearances by Kendrick Lamar and The Weekend. It samples Led Zeppelin, Animal Collective and The Beat’s version of Can’t Get Used To Losing You. There’s even a country song. Over the past few years, we’ve grown accustomed to Taylor Swift settling scores with Harry Styles, John Mayer and Katy Perry. But that’s just kid’s stuff. With Lemonade, Beyoncé proves there’s a thin line between love and hate.

The queen, in middle-fingers-up mode, makes her most powerful, ambitious statement yet

Whether Beyoncé likes it or not – and everything about Lemonade suggests she lives for it – she's the kind of artist whose voice people hear their own stories in, whatever our stories may be. She's always aspired to superhero status, even from her earliest days in a girl group that was tellingly named Destiny's Child. (Once upon a time, back in the Nineties, "No No No" was the only Destiny's Child song in existence – but make no mistake, we could already hear she was Beyoncé.) She lives up to every inch of that superhero status on Lemonade. Like the professional heartbreaker she sings about in "6 Inch," she murdered everybody and the world was her witness.

Lemonade is Beyoncé’s Career-Defining Album

Beyoncé, an extraordinary album in its own right, revealed Beyoncé hungered to leave her peers behind, to join the pantheon of all-time greats. Lemonade is her invitation into Olympus. It’s a rare album that sounds this warm, this easy, this melodic, this fierce, this startling, this unforgettable. They come once, maybe twice, in a career, and that career has to be exceptional to start with. To paraphrase Jack White on “Don’t Hurt Yourself”, the time has come to worship God herself. Genuflect, bitches.

Her boldest, most ambitious, best album to date

You may have heard that Beyoncé put out an album about her husband, Jay Z. You heard wrong: Lemonade is about one person, and that person’s name is Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. The famously guarded pop queen pours all of herself into her remarkable sixth album, a raw and intensely personal plunge into the heart of marital darkness. What happens when one of the world’s most powerful women feels invisible? She makes herself known.

Of course, many will still obsess over what it was Jay Z did and with whom. If you want to spend your time speculating, cool—that’s your deal. But Beyoncé’s not thinking about that. She’s too busy putting out her boldest, most ambitious, best album to date. Middle fingers up.

Raw yet polished, beautiful yet ugly, all Beyoncé

Lemonade marks Beyoncé’s most accomplished work yet. It is the perfect combination of the sharp songwriting of 4 with the visual storytelling acumen of her self-titled record. Here, we see Beyoncé fully coming into her own: wise, accomplished, and in defense of herself. Many artists struggle with finding the right balance, but then Beyoncé is not like many artists. Rather than mold to the conformity of contemporary music, she leans firmly into her own instincts and vision. Those instincts believe in visual storytelling. They also believe in the roots of ourselves. On Lemonade, our personal is the political. On Lemonade, the music that shaped us, from gospel to rock to r&b to trap, tell the stories of our lives. It is a risk, especially today, but Beyoncé has earned these risks time and time again through her timeless hits and unparalleled work ethic. Now, with her latest album, she has given us perhaps her greatest gift yet: herself, raw yet polished, beautiful yet ugly.

Beyoncé’s Lemonade pushes pop music into smarter, deeper places

All over Lemonade, Beyoncé is describing her own personal reality, on her terms and informed by her worldview. That the album simultaneously pushes mainstream music into smarter, deeper places is simply a reminder of why she remains pop’s queen.

Will it work out? No one knows. But in the meantime she sings wholeheartedly, encapsulates deep dilemmas in terse singalong lines and touches on things that so many people feel. She is a star whose world is vastly different from that of her listeners. But in matters of the heart, with their complications and paradoxes, Beyoncé joins all of us.

Beyoncé Is the Rightful Heir to Michael Jackson and Prince on ‘Lemonade’

As a body of songs, Lemonade presents Bey at her most skilled and fully matriculated as a pop studio maven and conductor of the present’s preferred orchestral mode: creative file-sharing. The alignment of composing and arranging chops comes conjoined to a rock-solid thematic staple: the furies of a woman scorned becomes this doleful Electra. One whose muses are by stark lyrical turns also sardonic, sarcastic, baleful, mournful, murderous, adulterous, kittenish, self-eviscerating, self-devotional, self-resurrecting.

Lemonade the album, is out to sonorously suck you into its gully gravitational orbit the old fashioned way, placing the burden of conjuration on its steamy witches’ brew of beats, melodies, and heavy-hearted-to-merry-pranksterish vocal seductions. In her mastery of carnal and esoteric mysteries, Queen Bey raises the spirits, sizzles the flesh, and rallies her troops.

On 'Lemonade,' Beyoncé speaks vividly for herself -- and for others

“Lemonade” argues that dignity for all begins with dignity for one.

Narratively, Lemonade is as much a journey through self-reflection and healing as self-discovery, learning about who you are when faced with seemingly insurmountable trauma

On Lemonade, Beyoncé takes agony and, rather than spinning pure beauty out of it, refracts it and takes time to work through each facet: anger, sorrow, forgiveness and self-actualization. The result is an album in which millions will find their own struggles reflected back to them, as therapeutic as it is utterly dazzling. If you've ever been handed lemons, you need Lemonade.

A sensational, enraged return from a true icon...

‘Lemonade’ is an altogether different beast. A beast so intricately constructed it requires repeated viewings to digest all there is on offer. Presented as a short film, the project directed by Kahlil Joseph and Bey herself (and a whole host of co-directors and cinematographers), contains visceral imagery, spoken-word narration and a multitude of zeitgeist reference points. At the core it follows the tempestuous journey of a scorned woman and the stages she goes through in her process of healing and self-preservation. A few minutes in, it’s clear that ‘Lemonade’ is a triumph of spirit, Beyoncé’s spirit, on display in raw, uninhibited HD.

‘Lemonade’ is Beyoncé at her most benevolent, and her most unadulterated. Treating her blackness not as an affliction but a celebratory beacon, ‘Lemonade’ is a long overdue, cathartic retribution.

Beyonce's 'Lemonade' contains singer's most fully realized music yet

It’ll take a while to absorb everything that Beyonce has poured into her sixth studio album — a dozen songs plus a 60-minute movie that is more than just a mere advertisement for the music, but an essential companion that provides context and deepens understanding. But it’s apparent already that “Lemonade” is the artist’s most accomplished and cohesive work yet, and that’s not meant to underestimate the impact of a discography that has yielded era-defining singles such as “Single Ladies” and “Irreplaceable.”

“Lemonade” is more than just a play for pop supremacy. It’s the work of an artist who is trying to get to know herself better, for better or worse, and letting the listeners/viewers in on the sometimes brutal self-interrogation.

Beyoncé is on a roll. Her latest, another "visual album" with corresponding videos in the mold of her 2013 self-titled set, renders infidelity and reconciliation with a cinematic vividness

If the album is to be considered a document of some kind of truth, emotional or otherwise, then it seems Beyoncé was saving the juicy details for her own story. Because nothing she does is an accident, let’s assume she understands that any song she puts her name on will be perceived as being about her own very public relationship. So what we think we know about her marriage after listening is the result of Beyoncé wanting us to think that.

It’s an easy platitude to make, but it’s also an extremely Beyoncé way of looking at things. For a perfectionist who controls her image meticulously, Beyoncé is obsessed with the notion of realness. That’s the biggest selling point of an album like Lemonade, but there’s a quality to it that also invites skepticism: That desire to basically art-direct your own sobbing self-portrait to make sure your mascara smears in the most perfectly disheveled way. But who cares what's "real" when the music delivers a truth you can use.

Lemonade is a one-of-a-kind look into Beyoncé‘s personal life that sacrifices none of her regality

With Lemonade, Beyoncé has caused as much conversation as any single artist possibly could, and provided a one-of-a-kind look into her personal life without sacrificing any of her regality, something only she could do. Getting her paper is going to be the easy part.

Beyoncé – Lemonade review: 'A woman not to be messed with'

She’s obviously not the only major pop star willing to experiment and push at the boundaries of her sound: that’s clearly what Rihanna and Kanye West were attempting to do on Anti and The Life of Pablo respectively. The difference is that those albums were at best a bold and intriguing mess: the sense that the artists behind them were having trouble marshalling their ideas was hard to escape. Lemonade, however, feels like a success, made by someone very much in control. “This is your final warning,” she scowls on Don’t Hurt Yourself, “if you try this **** again, you lose your wife.” You rather get the feeling Jay Z should heed those words: on Lemonade, Beyonce sounds very much like a woman not to be messed with.

Lemonade, as bitter and sweet as the contradicting truth it declares, travels with Bey through her conceptual play on Kübler-Ross' stages of grief, formed shamelessly into eleven poignant acts - intuition, denial, anger, apathy, emptiness, accountability, reformation, forgiveness, resurrection, hope, and redemption – eventually making it through to the other side unscathed and at peace.

Lemonade is that rare work where you will remember exactly where you were and exactly who you were with the first time you hear it

You can argue about whether you’ll hear better pop albums this year and you may very well win that dispute, but Lemonade is that rare work where you will remember exactly where you were and exactly who you were with the first time you heard it. Few albums can lift themselves up to the level of “experiences”, but few albums could ever be considered as bold, complex, or resolute as Lemonade.

On Lemonade, the pop superstar explores how history and family lineage can weigh on personal relationships in the present

Lemonade is her most out-there album yet – both in the nakedness with which the notoriously private star is seemingly describing marital strife with husband Jay-Z, and in the huge scope of musical influences it encompasses, from wild and raw gospel and blues rock to precisely calibrated R&B

What sets Lemonade apart are the ways it continually highlights the fine line between empathy and anger. It’s a line Beyoncé walks with supreme confidence: “When love me/ you love yourself,” Jack White sings on the incendiary Don’t Hurt Yourself. “Love God herself.”

Beyoncé’s fury at her adulterous husband burns bright on a surprisingly honest and personal sixth album

‘Lemonade’ is strikingly varied.

“Who the **** do you think I am?” Beyoncé demands three tracks into her unforeseeably bold sixth album, ‘Lemonade’, her voice dripping with distortion. “You ain't married to no average bitch, boy”. If these lyrics aren’t fiction, the man she’s castigating for adultery in the most public forum possible is her multimillionaire husband, Jay Z: “If you try this sh*t again,” she snarls, “you gon’ lose your wife.”

‘Lemonade’'s first four tracks are a thrillingly honest sucker-punch from a famously guarded pop star, who came to fame via Destiny’s Child and whose picture-perfect solo career has since helped her amass a fortune exceeding $450m. When, moments later (on ‘Sorry’) she tells Jay Z to “suck on my balls” the sense of release is palpable. These words come from a woman whose public image is so clean that FLOTUS Michelle Obama has said she wants to be her.

Far from just being an oh-no-he-didn’t tour de force, ‘Lemonade’ matches context with real substance

From opening to closing lyric, Beyoncé’s sixth album is designed with the clearest purpose. Every last drop of ‘Lemonade’ exists for a reason. And while the current ball-busting talk around the record’s narrative won’t subside, there’s so much more than an enthralling story to draw out of this all-slaying work.Queen Bey takes no prisoners - that much was clear on previous records. But this isn’t so much a middle finger as an endless, apocalyptic storm. Far from being just an oh-no-he-didn’t tour de force, ’Lemonade’ matches context with real substance.

In a year when the world’s biggest artists have put their necks on the line - Rihanna’s leave-me-alone, independent streak of ‘Anti’, Kanye West’s scatterbrained ever-changing doodle ‘The Life of Pablo’ - Beyoncé can count herself as a risk-taker breaking new ground, up there with the bravest.

Lemonade is Beyoncé's most lyrically and thematically coherent effort to date.

If Lemonade feels less ambitious than the near-70-minute BEYONCÉ, it's probably because the penetrating spoken-word interludes, composed of verses by Somali-British poet Warsan Shire, featured in Lemonade's accompanying long-form music video have been excised from the album itself. A reference in the film to “my father, a magician, able to exist in two places at once” feels like an accurate depiction of Mathew Knowles, who fathered a child while still married to Beyoncé's mother, but the rifle-toting paternal figure at the center of the Americana pastiche “Daddy Lessons” is deceased, so it's unclear how autobiographical Lemonade is intended to be. In the film, Beyoncé's own potential struggle with infidelity in her marriage is juxtaposed with shots of the singer dressed in a black hoodie and footage of black mothers holding portraits of their sons, killed by police. But whether the album's lyrics are pure autobiography, or merely a snapshot of true events interwoven with the stories of countless other women, poetic license never sounded so personal.

Mrs. Knowles-Carter indeed turns her own lemons into Lemonade

Mrs. Knowles-Carter indeed turns her own lemons into Lemonade. She uses the platform to demand contrition from her adulterous partner, assert her excellence, reflect upon the bonds with the men in her life, and their relationships with other women, and wonders if her trust can be earned back. The cathartic and wounded moments here resonate in a manner matched by few, if any, of Beyoncé's contemporaries.