Lemonade: all the news on Beyoncé’s latest album

The bulk of the popular conversation surrounding Beyoncé’s new album Lemonade has revolved around the specifics underpinning the record’s central drama. Is "Becky with the good hair" Rachel Roy, Rita Ora, or no one at all? (We know it’s not Rachael Ray.) When did her marriage fracture for good, and when was it put back together? Just how much black girl magic did she have to use to make Jack White interesting again? They’re salacious and puffy lines of inquiry — the unavoidable consequences of a public and celebrated life and marriage — and they’re obscuring the roots that snake through Beyoncé’s discography and hold Lemonade up.

The album’s seeming transparency and frankness aren’t revelatory or unexpected. They’re the culmination of a half-decade that Beyoncé has spent refining her skills as both a visual stylist and a storyteller, and it’s her interest in narrative heft that led her to fill Lemonade with the slightest and most insular music she’s ever recorded. The result is an album that feels closer to movies like Kramer vs. Kramer and The Kids Are All Right than traditional pop records. It’s a devastating relationship drama with a complicated resolution, one that just happens to use songs as vehicles for its story rather than dialogue, and its soundtrack was created by the biggest pop star in the world.

Floating in the wake of Beyoncé's Lemonade, one feels the urge to react. Our options are limited mostly to tweeting, blogging, crying, or talking to Mom. But conversation and off-the-cuff criticism don't feel like enough — Lemonade is a call to make something, not to chit-chat. Great art inspires more art.

"The Lemons," a piece of fan fiction published on Wordpress yesterday, is art. It imagines the fallout of Lemonade as it transpires between an amazing cast that includes actor Taraji P. Henson, director Ava Duvernay, Beyoncé's sister Solange, most of the Kardashians, Kanye West, Beyoncé's mother, and of course, Beyoncé and Jay Z. It is written as a screenplay, more or less, with Jay Z dodging increasingly acrobatic assaults from Solange in between volleys of percussive dialogue. At one point, Kanye instructs Tyga to put himself on "airplane mode," in deference to Queen B. Thank god.

It’s tempting to look at Beyoncé’s new "visual album" Lemonade as a show of celebrity force that’s without parallel in pop music. No one’s ever used an hour on premium cable to unveil an album-length airing of marital grievances so potent fans thought it might be coupled with a divorce announcement. (It’s a testament to Beyoncé’s command over the public imagination that the idea of a promotional divorce announcement wasn’t completely insane in the first place.) It’s a hyper-ambitious political gesture and an unyielding study of a troubled marriage, and the music — did you forget about the music? — isn’t half-bad either.

Beyoncé isn’t the only recent female pop star to realize her personality is powerful enough to serve as an aesthetic coagulant, and she’s not the only artist to use her complicated personal life as fodder for raw, specific art. Where does her genius lie? She marries those two qualities and fuses them to an equally essential visual component, and she ensures it’s all delivered in an airtight package. It’s that combination of visionary thinking and attention to detail that makes Lemonade feel like the endpoint of a slow shift toward cohesive, self-centered pop albums — one that began in earnest with the release of her self-titled LP at the end of 2013.

Plot twist: when Beyoncé told us "I got hot sauce in my bag / swag" she was not talking about a condiment. She was talking about a baseball bat, which she uses to bust up car windshields and fire hydrants and wig store security cameras, singing, "I don't want to lose my pride but Imma fuck me up a bitch."

Well, okay!

Even though the album is only available on Tidal for streaming listeners, fans and non-subscribers willing to buy Beyoncé's new album Lemonade are now able to enjoy it. Tidal just announced that both the record and the film that aired on HBO last night are now available for download worldwide for $17.99. Users who pick up the album will also be given a 90-day free trial for the streaming service.

The news comes as a boon for Bey fans who've up until now hesitated to sign up for Tidal. According to the company, making the visual album available for download opens it up to fans around the world, including areas where the service hasn't launched.

If you were hoping to wait a week and stream Beyoncé's new album Lemonade on Apple Music or Spotify, you can give up on that dream. Lemonade will be exclusively streaming on Tidal in perpetuity, a source confirmed to The Verge.

This is the second album from a major artist that Tidal has locked down a major streaming exclusive for, following Kanye West's seventh album, The Life of Pablo, which streamed exclusively on the service for six weeks before becoming available on Spotify and Apple Music. But right now, there is no timetable for Lemonade to become available on competing streaming services.

Surprise! Beyoncé just released her new album Lemonade, putting an end to speculation that began in earnest when she released the single "Formation" a day before performing as part of the Super Bowl halftime show. The release of Lemonade comes minutes after Beyonce's HBO special of the same name — which turned out to be a visual album — finished airing. It's her sixth studio album and first since 2013's celebrated Beyoncé, an album she released without any promotion or warning in December of that year. Lemonade is exclusively available on Tidal.

Lemonade only has a handful of features, with Jack White, The Weeknd, James Blake, and Kendrick Lamar making appearances on the album. The 12-track album is Beyoncé's second "visual album" and the first time she has released a solo album without actually putting it up for sale — at least for now. No artist as big as Beyoncé has ever made their album solely available through streaming at release, (Kanye West was the biggest artist up until now) giving Lemonade a strong chance to shatter all current streaming records.

If you find yourself thirsty for more Lemonade after watching the brief teaser Beyoncé released on Saturday afternoon, you're in luck: she made an extended trailer for her mysterious HBO special available last night. (It aired on HBO just before Vinyl's season finale, meaning there was at least one reason to watch Vinyl's season finale.) It's clear that Lemonade is both cinematic and hyper-ambitious, even if its link to Beyoncé's expected new album isn't as definite.

The minute-long clip is full of compelling imagery: stormy skies, blood-red corridors, buildings going up in flame. It feels more like a horror movie than a music video, and that's pretty exciting. It also has the same visual style as "Formation," the song and video Beyoncé released just a day before performing at the Super Bowl halftime show. With her world tour of the same name on the horizon, it's reasonable to assume Lemonade is going to serve as the bridge between "Formation" and Beyoncé's next big release. We'll find out what that means in less than a week.

Beyoncé is expected to release a new album any day now, and the singer just teased a "World Premiere Event" a week from now. Lemonade will air on Saturday, April 23rd at 9PM ET on HBO, and you can see the short teaser video above. It's truly a teaser in that it doesn't show much of anything — Beyoncé leaning up against a car saying "what am I gonna do?" — but it's at least a solid indication that her new album is imminent. Beyond the teaser for whatever this project is, she's also on deadline to release the album considering the Formation World Tour begins April 27th in Miami.

Since releasing "Formation" a day before performing at the Super Bowl halftime show, rumors have suggested Beyoncé would release her sixth studio album in April. As Bustle reported, the singer was rumored to be working on something called "Project Lemonade," which lines up with today's teaser. If other rumors are correct, Kahlil Joseph, who has directed videos for FKA Twigs and Kendrick Lamar, may be involved.