Forward (song)

''Lemonade'' is the sixth studio album by American singer Beyoncé. It was released on April 23, 2016, by Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records, accompanied by a 65-minute film of the same title. It follows her self-titled fifth studio album (2013), and is a concept album with a song cycle that relates Beyoncé's emotional journey after her husband's infidelity in a generational and racial context. Primarily an R&B and art pop album, ''Lemonade'' encompasses a variety of genres, including reggae, blues, rock, hip hop, soul, funk, Americana, country, gospel, electronic, and trap. It features guest vocals from James Blake, Kendrick Lamar, the Weeknd, and Jack White, and contains samples and interpolations of a number of hip hop and rock songs.

''Lemonade'' is considered to be one of the greatest albums of all time, and is the most acclaimed studio album of Beyoncé's career. The album was music critics' top album of 2016, and was named the greatest album of the 2010s by publications such as the Associated Press. In 2020, the album was placed at number 32 on ''Rolling Stone'''s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. The album was nominated for nine Grammy Awards at the 59th Annual Grammy Awards (2017), including Album of the Year, Record of the Year and Song of the Year. It won Best Urban Contemporary Album and Best Music Video. The album's visuals received 11 nominations at the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards, of which it won eight including Breakthrough Long Form Video and Video of the Year. The film also received four nominations at the 68th Primetime Emmy Awards. The album won a Peabody Award in Entertainment.

''Lemonade'' topped the charts in various countries worldwide, including the US ''Billboard'' 200, where it earned 653,000 with additional album-equivalent units, including 485,000 copies in its first week of sales. It has since been certified triple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). By the end of 2016, ''Lemonade'' had sold over 1.5 million copies in the United States, making it the third-best-selling album of the year in the US, and it was the best-selling album of 2016, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), with 2.5 million copies sold worldwide. The album was supported by five singles: "Formation", which was a top-ten hit on the US ''Billboard'' Hot 100, " Sorry", " Hold Up", " Freedom", and " All Night". In April 2016, Beyoncé embarked on The Formation World Tour to promote the album, an all-stadium tour visiting North America and Europe.

Background

On February 6, 2016, Beyoncé released "Formation" for free on the music streaming service Tidal and an accompanying unlisted music video on her official YouTube account. The unlisted format of the video meant it was inaccessible by search, and viewers could only watch it through others that had shared the video link, or through articles and webpages that embedded the video. Beyoncé later released an identical public version of the unlisted video on YouTube on December 9, 2016. Both videos still exist. The day after the song and video's release, Beyoncé performed "Formation" during her performance at the Super Bowl 50 halftime show. Immediately after the performance, a commercial aired announcing The Formation World Tour, which kicked off in Miami, Florida on April 27, 2016, with the first pre-sales going on sale just two days after the announcement on February 9, 2016. Beyoncé was both praised and criticized over her "Formation" and the Black Panther-influenced costume for her Super Bowl halftime performance. As a result of this, the hashtags "#BoycottBeyonce" and "#IStandWithBeyonce" began trending on social media platforms such as Twitter and Beyoncé faced boycotts from police unions. A group of protesters planned to stage an "anti-Beyoncé" rally outside of the NFL's headquarters in New York City, New York on the day general sale of tickets went for sale, but no protesters showed up; instead, dozens of Beyoncé supporters held a rally for her.

On June 7–8, 2016, Beyonce performed two days of concerts at Citi Field in Queens, New York, as a part of The Formation World Tour. She sneezed twice at the concert, and her costume ripped during the performance of "Halo." During the concert she projected the words "God is God. I am not" onto a large screen.

When asked what she wanted to accomplish with the next phase of her career in an interview with ''Elle'', published on April 4, 2016, Beyoncé said: "I hope I can create art that helps people heal. Art that makes people feel proud of their struggle. Everyone experiences pain, but sometimes you need to be uncomfortable to transform."

Recording and production

''Lemonade'' was recorded between June 2014 and July 2015 across 11 studios in the United States. Beyoncé had the idea to write each song corresponding to the eleven chapters that can be seen in the ''Lemonade'' film, and posted moodboards around the studio representing each chapter to provide direction to her collaborators. Beyoncé and her collaborators also played music in the studio to inspire each other. The album was written in stages, with Beyoncé retreating to her home to work on the recordings with recording and mixing engineer Stuart White, as well as to take care of her daughter. The process began at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, which the team used for a month. They then took a break, and later went to Paris for 45 days. The team stayed in a hotel and set up two studios in two different hotel rooms, one for Beyoncé and one for Jay-Z. Jay-Z recounted how he and Beyoncé recorded music both separately and together, describing it as "using our art almost like a therapy session" after his infidelity. The music that Beyoncé recorded separately was what became ''Lemonade'' and was released first.

''Lemonade'' was produced through Beyoncé's synthesis of the work of many collaborators, including both popular and lesser known artists. MNEK relayed how " Hold Up" was written, saying "The way Beyoncé works, the song is a jigsaw piece and then she will piece various elements. It could be a bit that she's written, a bit that someone else has written and she'll make that the bridge; a bit I've written she'll make the middle eight". MNEK also explains that Beyoncé was "overlooking everything, saying ''"''I like this, I like that, this is how this should sound, this is how that should sound.''"''" " Don't Hurt Yourself" collaborator Jack White describes how "she took just sort of a sketch of a lyrical outline and turned into the most bodacious, vicious, incredible song... I'm so amazed at what she did with it." "Hold Up" and " Sorry" co-writer and co-producer MeLo-X explains that "she has a way of creating that I've never seen before as an artist. She produces, alters and arranges tracks in ways I wouldn't think of." When talking about how he scored the ''Lemonade'' film as well, MeLo-X explains "She's hands on with everything. She gives direction on everything and is very involved with the whole process. It's inspiring to see an artist on that level be able to just still have an eye for certain things and an ear... We would just sit down and go over with different things and different scenes and sounds and kind of put it together piece by piece."

Themes

As a multimedia audiovisual artwork, ''Lemonade'' relates the emotional journey of Beyoncé after her husband Jay-Z's infidelity in a generational and racial context through its music, lyrics, visuals and poetry. The ''Lemonade'' album is a song cycle (referencing the classical compositional genre defined in German Lieder by Robert Schumann, Franz Schubert and Johannes Brahms) that is performed as an elaboration of the Kübler-Ross model, with the tracks (excluding "Formation") corresponding to the eleven chapters of the ''Lemonade'' film: "Intuition", "Denial", "Anger", "Apathy", "Emptiness", "Accountability", "Reformation", "Forgiveness", "Resurrection", "Hope", and " Redemption".

Melina Matsoukas, the director of the "Formation" music video, said that Beyoncé explained to her the concept behind ''Lemonade'', stating: "She wanted to show the historical impact of slavery on black love, and what it has done to the black family, and black men and women—how we're almost socialized not to be together." Beyoncé wrote on this in a 2018 ''Vogue'' article about the "generational curses" in her family, explaining that she comes "from a lineage of broken male-female relationships, abuse of power, and mistrust", including a slave owner who married a slave. Beyoncé continues, writing "Only when I saw that clearly was I able to resolve those conflicts in my own relationship. Connecting to the past and knowing our history makes us both bruised and beautiful."

This theme is repeated throughout ''Lemonade'', with Beyoncé's grief, trauma and struggle being connected to that of her family's ancestors. The sixth track "Daddy Lessons" acts as a turning point for the album, with Beyoncé linking Jay-Z cheating on her with her father Mathew Knowles cheating on her mother Tina. Towards the end of ''Lemonade'', Beyoncé reveals the meaning behind the album title, showing Jay-Z's grandmother Hattie White saying "I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up. I was served lemons, but I made lemonade", and describing her own grandmother, Agnez Deréon, as an "alchemist" who "spun gold out of this hard life" with the instructions to overcome these challenges passed down through generations like a lemonade recipe.

Black feminism

Miriam Bale for ''Billboard'' called ''Lemonade'' "a revolutionary work of Black feminism" as "a movie made by a black woman, starring Black women, and for Black women", in which Beyoncé is seen gathering, uniting and leading Black women throughout the film. As well as relating the story of Beyoncé's relationship with her husband, ''Lemonade'' also chronicles the relationship between Black women and American society. This includes how the United States betrayed and continually mistreats Black women, with society needing to solve its problems in order to enable reformation and the rehabilitation of Black women. As part of reverting the societal oppression and silencing of Black women, ''Lemonade'' centralizes the experiences of Black women in a way that is not often seen in the media, and celebrates their achievements despite the adversity they face.

"Don't Hurt Yourself" contains a quote from Malcolm X in which he said "The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman". The Black female public figures that Beyoncé featured in the film all have successful careers despite experiencing misogynoir and racism in the media. The film also contains clips of everyday Black women from working class communities, bringing visibility to Black women who are often ignored and undermined by society. The film envisions a space where there was never oppression of Black women, whereby Beyoncé and other Black women form a self-sufficient community in which they can heal together. ''Lemonade'' also defies and dismantles stereotypical representations of Black women as monolithic and angry Black women, instead attributing them complexity, agency, strength and vulnerability.

To create ''Lemonade'', Beyoncé drew from the work of a wide variety of Black women who are often overlooked or forgotten. The music draws inspiration from Black female blues musicians such as Shug Avery, Bessie Smith and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who also used their personal trauma to empower Black women, as well as samples songs originally recorded by Black women, namely Memphis Minnie and Dionne Warwick, but whose most famous recordings are by male or white artists. The visuals drew inspiration from works by Black feminists such as Julie Dash's ''Daughters Of The Dust'', Alice Walker's ''In Search Of Our Mothers' Gardens'', and Toni Morrison's ''The Bluest Eye''. Other influences for ''Lemonade'' include literary work by Black women focusing on themes including African-American folklore (such as Zora Neale Hurston's ''Their Eyes Were Watching God)'' and Afrofuturism (such as Octavia Butler's '' Kindred'').

African-American culture

Beyoncé also uses ''Lemonade'' as a form of recognition, commemoration and celebration of the culture and history of Black people in the Deep South and in the United States as a whole. The film contains allusions to slavery, such as the House of Slaves' Door of No Return in Senegal and the dungeons of Elmina Castle in Ghana, where slaves were taken before being shipped to the Americas. In "Love Drought", Beyoncé walks with her dancers into the sea, alluding to the Igbo Landing of 1803, where Igbo slaves took control of their slave ship, and rather than submit to slavery, marched into the sea while singing in Igbo, drowning themselves. Beyoncé appears wearing a tignon, in reference to Louisiana's tignon laws implemented in 1786 that limited African-American women's dress in order to maintain the state's racist social hierarchies. The film also contains references to African religion and spirituality, such as Yoruba ori body paint in "Sorry", allusions to the loa Erzulie Red-Eyes in "Don't Hurt Yourself", and Beyoncé's initiation into the Santería religion and embodiment of the Yoruba orisha Oshun in "Hold Up". Allusions to New Orleans culture include "Queen of Creole cuisine" Leah Chase, the Edna Karr Marching Band, jazz funerals, Mardi Gras Indians and the Superdome.

Beyoncé is seen with other Black women on plantations in ''Lemonade''. In the "Formation" video, the walls of the plantation houses are covered with French Renaissance-style portraits of Black subjects; director Melina Matsoukas states that "films about slavery traditionally feature white people in these roles of power and position. I wanted to turn those images on their head." Towards the end of ''Lemonade'', Beyoncé and several Black women are on a plantation, with Chris Kelly for ''Fact'' writing "Instead of an antebellum memory, these scenes portray a dream: the fantasy of an all-Black, matriarchal utopia when women dress up, prepare meals, take photographs and perform shows, not for a master but for themselves." Throughout the film, Beyoncé can be seen in Fort Macomb, a Confederate States Army stronghold that was taken over by one of the first all-Black Union Army units – the 1st Louisiana Native Guard – and eventually destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. On the central track "Daddy Lessons", Beyoncé is seen standing in a hideaway in the fort, alluding to the Underground Railroad. However, on the closer "All Night", Beyoncé is seen above ground, walking on top of the ruins of the fort in an antebellum-style dress made in West African material, possibly inspired by artist Yinka Shonibare who is known for reappropriating "European import — the cloth — to remake symbols of European cultural dominance in the spirit of Africa".

On " Don't Hurt Yourself", Beyoncé samples Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks". However, the classic rock song was originally written by black Delta blues artists Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie, with the song referring to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 which displaced hundreds of thousands of African Americans. With the sample, Beyoncé reappropriates the song that was written by Black people about black history. In general, Beyoncé also reappropriates genres that were influenced by African Americans that are now seen as predominantly white genres on ''Lemonade'', such as rock in "Don't Hurt Yourself" and country in "Daddy Lessons".

Music and lyrics

The album features musicians Jack White, Kendrick Lamar, and bassist Marcus Miller, and sampling from folk music collectors John Lomax, Sr. and his son Alan Lomax on "Freedom". Beyoncé and her team reference the musical memories of all those periods, including a brass band, stomping blues rock, ultraslow avant-R&B, preaching, a prison song (both collected by John and Alan Lomax), and the sound of the 1960s fuzz-tone guitar psychedelia (sampling the Puerto Rican band Kaleidoscope).
The ''Washington Post'' called the album a "surprisingly furious song cycle about infidelity and revenge". The ''Chicago Tribune'' described the album as not just a mere grab for popular music dominance, rather it is a retrospective that allows the listener to explore Beyoncé's personal circumstances, with musical tones from the southern United States, a harkening back towards her formative years spent in Texas. AllMusic wrote that Beyoncé "delights in her Blackness, femininity, and Southern origin with supreme wordplay."

According to ''The A.V. Club'', the tracks "encompass and interpolate the entire continuum of R&B, rock, soul, hip hop, pop, and blues", accomplished by a deft precision "blurring eras and references with determined impunity." ''The Guardian'' and ''Entertainment Weekly'' both noted that the album touches on country, and ''Entertainment Weekly'' noticed the use of avant-garde musical elements. ''Consequence of Sound'' wrote that the album's genres span "from gospel to rock to R&B to trap"; On the album, Isaac Hayes and Andy Williams are among the sampled artists. ''PopMatters'' noticed how the album was nuanced in its theme of anger and betrayal with vast swathes of the album bathed in political context; however, it is still a pop album at its essence with darker and praiseworthy tones. In 2020, Marc Hogan from ''Pitchfork'' considered ''Lemonade'' among the great art pop albums of the last 20 years to "have filled the void of full-length statements with both artistic seriousness and mass appeal that was formerly largely occupied by ockguitar bands".

Title and artwork

There are two suggested inspirations for the album's title. The song " Freedom" includes at its end an audio recording of Hattie White, grandmother of Beyoncé's husband Jay-Z's, telling a crowd at her ninetieth birthday party in December 2015: "I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up. I was served lemons, but I made lemonade", referencing the proverb "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade" that encourages turning sourness and difficulty to something positive. Beyoncé also draws a connection to her own grandmother, Agnez Deréon, using her lemonade recipe that was passed down through the generations as a metaphor for the mechanisms for healing passed through generations.

The cover artwork for ''Lemonade'' is from the music video shot for " Don't Hurt Yourself" and features Beyoncé wearing cornrows and a fur coat, leaning against a Chevrolet Suburban and covering her face with her arm. In 2023, Joe Lynch of ''Billboard'' ranked it the 99th best album cover of all time.

Release and promotion

''Lemonade'' was first made available for online streaming via Tidal on April 23, 2016, through Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records, and for digital download the following day. It was released for CD and DVD on May 6, 2016. A limited edition box set titled ''How to Make Lemonade'' was made available for pre-order on August 18, 2017, containing a six-hundred-page coffee table book, featuring a set of pictures and behind-the-scenes content showcasing the making of the album, and a double vinyl LP of ''Lemonade''. Standalone vinyl was released on September 15, 2017. Upon its release, ''Lemonade'' was only available to stream on Tidal; however the album was eventually released to all other streaming platforms on April 23, 2019, exactly three years after its release. The version of the album that was made available on other streaming services contains the original audio part of ''Lemonade'' as well as the original demo of "Sorry" as a bonus.

Beyoncé had a goal to perform the entire ''Lemonade'' album live. Beyoncé performed "Formation" at the Super Bowl 50 halftime show as part of her guest appearance at the event, with critics lauding the performance and stating that she stole the show from headliners Coldplay. The political symbolism in the performance also inspired many thinkpieces and discussions on their history and significance.
Beyoncé performed " Freedom" with Kendrick Lamar as the surprise opening number at the 2016 BET Awards on June 27. The performance began with an audio clip of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. The performance was met with acclaim by critics. At the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards on August 28, Beyoncé performed a sixteen-minute medley of "Pray You Catch Me", " Hold Up", " Sorry", " Don't Hurt Yourself", and "Formation", and included interludes of the poetry as heard in the ''Lemonade'' film. Critics noted that Beyoncé used political symbolism during "Pray You Catch Me", which included angel-like dancers in historical black hairstyles (such as Bantu knots, braids and dreadlocks) successively falling to the ground as though shot, alluding to police brutality, and a black man in a black hoodie catching, uplifting and pushing Beyoncé forward, alluding to Trayvon Martin, who was killed when wearing a black hoodie.

On October 19, Beyoncé performed "6 Inch" and " All Night" at the TIDAL X benefit concert at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York City. On November 2, Beyoncé performed "Daddy Lessons" with the Dixie Chicks at the 50th Annual Country Music Association Awards (2016). The performance (which was the first featuring the Dixie Chicks in a decade after being blacklisted for their criticism of George W Bush in 2003) was widely praised by critics, but was met with criticism and racism by conservative country fans; this sparked conversations about the identity of country music and black people's place in it. Subsequently, a remix of "Daddy Lessons" featuring the Dixie Chicks was released. At the 59th Annual Grammy Awards on February 12, 2017, Beyoncé performed "Love Drought" and " Sandcastles". Themed around motherhood, the five-months pregnant Beyoncé's performance is recognised by commentators to evoke various female deities and Renaissance European Christian art (such as Tintoretto's ''Last Supper,'' Simone Martini's ''Maestà'' and depictions of the Virgin of Guadalupe) and various non-European allusions such as Fulani facepainting, Ethiopian icons, Byzantine jewelry and Latin American Baroque painting which visited countries in North America and Europe from April to October 2016. The stage featured the Es Devlin-designed 'Monolith', a revolving seven-storey-tall box made with video screen walls that could shoot out fire and fireworks and split open, and which revolved during the show to represent a new chapter in line with the ''Lemonade'' film.
The Formation World Tour was met with rave reviews from critics, such as Kat Bein for ''Rolling Stone'' who described the show as "a prime example of entertainment and a vision of an artist at her apex" and "a visual feast as well as an emotional tour de force, packed with fireworks, confetti, rearranging stage designs and aerial dancers." The Formation World Tour won Tour of the Year at the 2016 American Music Awards, was included in ''Rolling Stone'''s 50 Greatest Concerts of the Last 50 Years list in 2017, and was named the best tour of the decade (2010s) by ''Consequence of Sound'' in 2019.

The Formation World Tour was ranked at number one and number two on ''Pollstar'''s 2016 mid-year Top 100 Tours chart both in North America and worldwide respectively, with a total mid-year worldwide gross of $137.3 million from the first twenty-five shows (including $126.3 million from the first North American leg of the tour). In total, the tour grossed $256 million from forty-nine sold-out shows according to ''Billboard'' box score, and ranked at number two on ''Pollstar'''s 2016 Year-End Tours chart.

Accompanying film

''Lemonade'' was accompanied by the release of a sixty-five-minute film of the same title, produced by Good Company and Jonathan Lia, which premiered on HBO on April 23, 2016, logging 787,000 viewers. It is divided into eleven chapters, titled "Intuition", "Denial", "Anger", "Apathy", "Emptiness", "Accountability", "Reformation", "Forgiveness", "Resurrection", "Hope", and "Redemption".
The film uses poetry and prose written by British-Somali poet Warsan Shire; the poems adapted were "The Unbearable Weight of Staying", "Dear Moon", "How to Wear Your Mother's Lipstick", "Nail Technician as Palm Reader", and "For Women Who Are Difficult to Love".

The film's cast features Ibeyi, Laolu Senbanjo, Amandla Stenberg, Quvenzhané Wallis, Chloe x Halle, Zendaya and Serena Williams. In "Forward", the mothers of Trayvon Martin (Sybrina Fulton), Michael Brown (Lesley McFadden), and Eric Garner (Gwen Carr) are featured holding pictures of their deceased sons. Jay-Z and Beyoncé's daughter Blue Ivy appears in home video footage at one point, as does Jay-Z's grandmother Hattie White, and Beyoncé's mother Tina Knowles, who is shown with her second husband Richard Lawson on their wedding day in 2015. The film also samples work by Malcolm X, specifically an excerpt from his speech "Who Taught You to Hate Yourself", which is featured on the track " Don't Hurt Yourself".

The ''Lemonade'' film appeared on a number of critics' lists. ''Pitchfork'' listed ''Lemonade'' at number one on their list of best music videos of 2016.
It was also included on ''Sight & Sound''s best films of 2016 list at number twenty-six. David Ehrlich, a film critic for IndieWire, placed ''Lemonade'' at number twenty-three on his Best Films of 2016 list. Jen Yamato from ''The Daily Beast'' ranked it at number nine on her list of the Top 10 Best Films of 2016. In June 2016, Matthew Fulks sued Beyoncé, Sony Music, Columbia Records and Parkwood Entertainment for allegedly lifting nine visual elements of his short film ''Palinoia'' for the trailer for ''Lemonade''. The lawsuit was subsequently dismissed by New York federal judge Jed S. Rakoff, siding with the defendant.

Singles

''Lemonade'' consisted of five singles, three of which would become major hits. All twelve songs charted on the US ''Billboard'' Hot 100. "Formation" was released as the album's first single exclusively on Tidal on February 6, 2016, along with its accompanying music video. The song was part of the set Beyoncé performed the following day at the Super Bowl 50 halftime show. "Formation" peaked at number ten on the US ''Billboard'' Hot 100. The music video for the song was uploaded onto Vevo in December 2016.

"Sorry" was released as the second single and serviced to rhythmic adult contemporary radio in the United States on May 3, 2016, and its music video was uploaded onto Vevo on June 22, 2016. The single debuted and peaked at number eleven on the US ''Billboard'' Hot 100.

"Hold Up" was the third single and was first released to contemporary hit radio stations in Germany and the United Kingdom on May 12, 2016, and was later serviced to radio in the United States on August 16, 2016. It debuted and peaked at number thirteen on the US ''Billboard'' Hot 100. The music video for "Hold Up" was uploaded onto Vevo on September 4, 2016.

The fourth and fifth singles released were " Freedom" and "All Night", respectively. Both became moderate hits with the former (released September 2016) peaking at US number thirty-five, and the latter (released December 2016) peaking at US number thirty-eight.

Critical reception

''Lemonade'' received universal acclaim from music critics upon release, and is widely considered to be Beyoncé's ''magnum opus''. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received a weighted average score of 92, based on 33 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".

In ''Spin'', Greg Tate calls ''Lemonade'' "a triumph of marketing and musicality, spectacle and song, vision and collaboration, Borg-like assimilation, and — as of 2013 — the element of surprise". Lauding both the film and album, Tate writes "Visually, literarily, choreographically, cinematically, this full accessing of her Southern bona fides shows up in the HBO project as ritual evidence that Bey's spent her downtime delving into the avant-garde mysticism of black-feminist poetry, novel writing, dance, gallery art, and film... The album, however, 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." AllMusic writer Andy Kellman called ''Lemonade'' "culturally seismic" through its "layers of meaning and references, and experienced en masse through its televised premiere", adding that "the cathartic and wounded moments here resonate in a manner matched by few, if any, of Beyoncé's contemporaries."

In a five-star review for ''Rolling Stone'', Rob Sheffield calls ''Lemonade'' "a welcome reminder that giants still walk among us", describing it as an "album of emotional discord and marital meltdown... from the most respected and creative artist in the pop game". Sheffield writes "''Lemonade'' is her most emotionally extreme music, but also her most sonically adventurous... Yet the most astounding sound is always Bey's voice", which is described as "her wildest, rawest vocals ever". Sheffield also compares ''Lemonade'' to Aretha Franklin's ''Spirit in the Dark'' and Nina Simone's ''Silk and Soul'' in the way that the album "reach sout historically, connecting her personal pain to the trauma of American blackness". Ray Rahman for ''Entertainment Weekly'' agrees, writing that ''Lemonade'' is "a raw and intensely personal plunge into the heart of marital darkness" as well as "a feminist blueprint, a tribute to women, African-Americans, and, especially, African-American women". Rahman further praises the diversity of the album: " eyoncécan do rock, blues, country, avant-garde, whatever. ''Lemonade'' stands as Bey's most diverse album to date. Sinister strip-club-in-the-future R&B... sits right next to a slab of Texas twang. Led Zeppelin and Soulja Boy become bedfellows."

Alexis Petridis of ''The Guardian'' wrote that the album "feels like a success" and that Beyoncé sounded "genuinely imperious". Petridis praises the musical arc of the album, commenting on how the music "slowly works itself up into a righteous frenzy of anger, shifting from the becalmed misery of opener "Pray You Catch Me" via the sparse simmer of " Hold Up"... before finally boiling over on the fantastic " Don't Hurt Yourself": a ferocious, distorted vocal as commanding as anything she's recorded". ''The Daily Telegraph'' writer Jonathan Bernstein felt it was her strongest work to date and "proves there's a thin line between love and hate." Nekesa Moody and Mohamad Soliman from ''The Washington Post'' called the album a "deeply personal, yet ... a bold social and political statement as well". Writing for ''The New York Times'', Jon Pareles

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