HBOJaws dropped as Beyoncé debuted her visual album Lemonade on HBO, and not just because it's brand-new music by Beyoncé.
Many viewers soon took to Twitter to express their shock at the massive amount of lyrics referencing marital problems and a cheating lover. Beyoncé and husband Jay Z, who appears in a movie clip after forgiveness, have never addressed such rumors. The shocking apparent theme of the album, which was released on Tidal after the HBO airing, did not go unnoticed by music critics.
"Marital strife smolders, explodes and uneasily subsides on Lemonade," The New York Times' Jon Pareles wrote.
"You can taste the dishonesty / It's all over your breath," Beyoncé sings in "Pray You Catch Me."
"And that's just the beginning of an album that probes betrayal, jealousy, revenge and rage before dutifully willing itself toward reconciliation at the end," Pareles wrote. "Many of the accusations are aimed specifically and recognizably at her husband, Shawn Carter, the rapper Jay Z."
In "Sorry," Beyoncé references a cheating lover's alleged other love interest, singing, "He only want me when I'm not there / He better call Becky with the good hair." While "Becky" was not identified as an actual person, designer Rachel Roy, who reportedly spurred a confrontation between Jay Z and Bey's sister Solange Knowles in a hotel elevator in 2014, drew the attention of the Beyhive when she tweeted a cryptic tweet referencing the lyric.
In contrast to 2013's uxorious Beyoncé, Lemonade is very much about romantic strife; it opens with the lyric "You can taste the dishonesty" and takes off from there, detailing transgressions both major and minor," Time magazine's Maura Johnston wrote. "Appropriately enough, it soars when Beyoncé is at her most aggrieved."
"Whether or not Lemonade is based on real-life events has been the subject of fevered discussion by forensic Beyoncéologists," she added. "But figuring out whatever blind items Beyoncé is laying down (on her husband's platform, no less) is hardly essential to enjoying this album. Its songs feel fresh yet instantly familiar, over-the-top but intimate, with Beyoncé's clarion voice serving as the fulcrum for her explorations of sound and the self."
Bernard Zuel wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald that "it's fair to say that if this drama is based on real life...or maybe is a brilliant messing with our heads in an age of over-sharing and over-knowing, saying, 'You think you know our lives? You don't know s---.'"
"Ultimately, we don't know if Beyoncé draws from personal experience for these songs," Mossi Reeves wrote in Rolling Stone. "More important is how she illustrates a cogent argument that strong and empowered women make better societies."
The Guardian's Alexis Petridis said, "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 will be released on Apple's iTunes Music Store at midnight EST.