Lemonade is the sixth studio album by the American singer and songwriter Beyoncé. It was surprise-released on April 23, 2016, by Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records, as a visual album together with a film of the same name. Beyoncé conceived Lemonade as a concept album that explores the historical Black female experience in the United States, allegorized as a personal journey through marital betrayal and healing, and structured as a song cycle based on the Kübler-Ross model.
Categorized by critics as an eclectic, genre-blending album with avant-garde and art pop elements, Lemonade explores a variety of genres including R&B, rock, country, soul, blues, hip-hop, jazz, reggae, pop, gospel, and funk. It features guest vocals from Jack White, the Weeknd, James Blake and Kendrick Lamar. Upon release, it topped charts and received platinum and multiplatinum certifications in several countries across Europe, the Americas, and Asia–Pacific, and became the world's best-selling album of the year. The album was supported by five singles and promoted through a series of televised performances, as well as the Formation World Tour—the first all-stadium tour by a female artist.
Lemonade was hailed as an instant classic upon release and has since been named one of the greatest albums of all time. Critics commended the experimental post-genre production and nuanced vocal performance, with particular praise for Beyoncé's raw vulnerability and bold socio-political messaging. It was music critics' top album of 2016 according to the BBC, was named the greatest album of the 2010s decade by publications such as the Associated Press, and topped Rolling Stone Greatest Albums of the 21st Century list. One of the most Grammy-nominated albums in history, Lemonade won Best Urban Contemporary Album and Best Music Video at the 59th Grammy Awards. It also won a Peabody Award in Entertainment at the 76th Annual Peabody Awards and received four nominations at the 68th Primetime Emmy Awards.
Lemonade is considered a cultural phenomenon, sparking widespread discourse on its personal revelations and socio-political commentary. It had a significant impact on the entertainment industry, inspiring other musicians and visual artists, and ignited trends across music, fashion and pop culture. The album has also been the subject of extensive analysis in academic journals, college courses, books, and museum exhibitions.
Background
Beyoncé's career took a transformative turn with the release of her fifth studio album, eponymously titled Beyoncé (2013). The album received widespread commercial and critical success, and its innovative surprise-release and visual format influenced how music is released in the digital age. This marked a significant shift in her public image, elevating her from a leading pop star to an auteur who defied industry conventions.
The following year, her personal life became a subject of public scrutiny after rumors spread of her husband Jay-Z's infidelity. This was fueled by a widely publicized incident at the 2014 Met Gala, where leaked elevator footage showed Beyoncé's sister Solange physically attacking Jay-Z. The family released a joint statement assuaging concerns, and while divorce rumors continued throughout Beyoncé and Jay-Z's joint On the Run Tour (2014), the couple presented a unified front.
On February 6, 2016, Beyoncé released the song "Formation" as a free download via music streaming service Tidal, accompanied by an unlisted music video on YouTube. The track, which blended trap and bounce, saw Beyoncé celebrate her culture, identity, and success as a black woman from the Southern United States. The song and video were met with widespread acclaim, with critics praising the release as a personal and political ode to black Southern heritage. Beyoncé performed the song a day after its release as part of a guest appearance during the Super Bowl 50 halftime show. A commercial aired after the performance announcing the Formation World Tour, with presales opening two days later. While the performance received positive reviews from fans and critics, it was met with backlash, boycotts, and protests from some conservative figures and law enforcement organizations over perceived anti-police, anti-American, and anti-white racist messages.
In an interview with Elle, published on April 4, 2016, Beyoncé was asked what she wanted to accomplish with the next phase of her career. She shared her desire to produce work that promoted healing and transformation, saying:"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. Pain is not pretty, but I wasn't able to hold my daughter in my arms until I experienced the pain of childbirth!"
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 a specific emotion that would form the chapters of the album and film, and posted mood boards 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. Beyoncé oversaw all aspects of the writing and production process; co-writers MNEK and Jonny Coffer noted that she had a clear vision for how the songs should sound, consistently offering direction and suggestions to guide the creative process. The songs were developed in a piecemeal fashion, with Beyoncé combining material that she had written herself with elements from other writers. Collaborator MeLo-X described Beyoncé's production style as highly distinctive, saying: "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."
Themes
As a multimedia audiovisual artwork, Lemonade relates the emotional journey of Beyoncé after 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 recurs 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, as Beyoncé links Jay-Z's infidelity with her father Mathew Knowles's infidelity to her mother Tina. Toward the end of Lemonade, Beyoncé reveals the meaning behind the 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. In addition to 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 reform and support the rehabilitation of Black women. As part of reverting the societal oppression and silencing of Black women, Lemonade centers 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 whom Beyoncé featured in the film all have successful careers despite having experienced 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, in which 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 granting 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, and samples songs originally recorded by Black women, namely Memphis Minnie and Dionne Warwick, but whose most famous recordings are by male or white artists. These musical references situate Lemonade within the broader tradition of blues women who used their art to voice Black women's emotional experiences and social realities. 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). Beyoncé specifically moves away from her typical music roots to develop a more communal spotlight on artistic hoodoo with other Black female creatives.