Beyonce announces new album Renaissance to drop in July
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Beyonce updated her social media accounts ahead of the album's release.
PHOTO: REUTERS
NEW YORK (NYTIMES) - Cue up the celebratory tweets: A new Beyonce album is coming.
On Thursday (June 16), Beyonce updated her social media accounts to indicate that a new project called Renaissance, apparently with the subtitle Act I, would be released on July 29.
A link on her website allowed fans to add the album in advance to their collections on streaming music services and her site is selling four "poses" - versions, or at least bundles - of boxed sets for the album, containing items including T-shirts, posters and a collectible box.
Renaissance will be Beyonce's first solo studio album since Lemonade in 2016. But she has released other material since then, including Everything Is Love, her joint album with Jay-Z, her husband, in 2018; Homecoming (2019), a live album and concert film from her appearance at the Coachella festival; The Lion King: The Gift, a companion album to the 2019 remake of The Lion King; and songs such as Black Parade (2020), which won a Grammy for best R&B performance, and Be Alive (2021), which appeared in the movie King Richard and was nominated for an Oscar.
Most surprising is that Beyonce teed up Renaissance in advance at all. In 2013, she blew up the music industry's marketing playbook by releasing her visual album Beyonce with no notice, simply telling fans via social media that it was available to purchase.
The album, and its novel method of release, became a global news story, demonstrating the power of superstars on social media to corral their fans and bend the rules of the business to their favor.
For years after, artists and their record companies sought to "pull a Beyonce" and repeat her success. Of course, only Beyonce could pull it off again, as she did in 2016 with Lemonade.
To Beyonce's superfans in the BeyHive, who constantly scour the Internet for any clues about their hero, the news about Renaissance was not a total surprise.
In recent days, fans have tweeted about the registration of what appear to be new Beyonce songs on industry databases, such as the one for the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.
