Beyonce Lemonade
Album stream , Apr 25, 2016

"Lemonade is Beyoncé’s finest hour."

100 % The Telegraph (UK)

"Lemonade marks Beyoncé’s most accomplished work yet. It is the perfect combination of the sharp songwriting of 4 with the visual storytelling acumen of her self-titled record. Here, we see Beyoncé fully coming into her own: wise, accomplished, and in defense of herself."

100 % Consequence of Sound

"This is her second visual album, and Lemonade is best served with the visuals, a semi-autobiographical film with deft dream-logic, a Purple Rain for the internet age. Its waves wash over the political-commercial-aesthetic limits of Beyonce, which at the time of its release felt a generic/political revelation, but now seems watered-down compared to the bittersweet specificity and holler of Lemonade."

100 % Tiny Mix Tapes

"Her boldest, most ambitious, best album to date."

100 % Entertainment Weekly

"Lemonade is fiery, insurgent, fiercely proud, sprawling and sharply focused in its dissatisfaction."

100 % The Independent (UK)

"It’s a rare album that sounds this warm, this easy, this melodic, this fierce, this startling, this unforgettable."

100 % Pretty Much Amazing

"Lemonade is her most emotionally extreme music, but also her most sonically adventurous."

100 % Rolling Stone

"Lemonade is by far Beyoncé’s strongest album."

100 % The Telegraph (UK)

"All over Lemonade, Beyoncé is describing her own personal reality, on her terms and informed by her worldview. That the album simultaneously pushes mainstream music into smarter, deeper places is simply a reminder of why she remains pop’s queen."

91 % The A.V. Club

"As a body of songs, Lemonade presents Bey at her most skilled and fully matriculated as a pop studio maven and conductor of the present’s preferred orchestral mode: creative file-sharing. ... Lemonade 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."

90 % Spin

"The result is an album in which millions will find their own struggles reflected back to them, as therapeutic as it is utterly dazzling. If you've ever been handed lemons, you need Lemonade."

90 % Exclaim

"Lemonade is Beyoncé at her most benevolent, and her most unadulterated. Treating her blackness not as an affliction but a celebratory beacon, Lemonade is a long overdue, cathartic retribution."

90 % Clash Music

"["Sorry,"] is a combative, unglossy track on an album full of them. ... As she did with her 2013 album, “Beyoncé,” she has also paired the music with full-length video that expands and deepens its impact."

90 % The New York Times

"On the fierce, vivid Lemonade, Beyoncé goes full shock and awe."

90 % Los Angeles Times

"It’ll take a while to absorb everything that Beyonce has poured into her sixth studio album--a dozen songs plus a 60-minute movie that is more than just a mere advertisement for the music, but an essential companion that provides context and deepens understanding. But it’s apparent already that Lemonade is the artist’s most accomplished and cohesive work yet."

88 % Chicago Tribune

"Lemonade is a stunning album, one that sees her exploring sounds she never has before. It also voices a rarely seen concept, that of the album-length ode to infidelity. Even stranger, it doesn’t double as an album-length ode to breaking up."

85 % Pitchfork

"This is a record that is highly sonically ambitious, and even the moments that don’t quite come together are carried by Beyoncé’s vocal talents and sheer star power."

80 % The Line of Best Fit

"Lemonade isn’t an easy album, but it wasn’t meant to be. Lemonade is blessed with nuance and fueled by anger, awash in politics but still meant to be consumed as a pop product. It’s as danceable as it is dark, as incendiary as it is inspiring."

80 % PopMatters

"In a year when the world’s biggest artists have put their necks on the line--Rihanna’s leave-me-alone, independent streak of ‘Anti’, Kanye West’s scatterbrained ever-changing doodle ‘The Life of Pablo’--Beyoncé can count herself as a risk-taker breaking new ground, up there with the bravest."

80 % DIY Magazine

"What sets Lemonade apart are the ways it continually highlights the fine line between empathy and anger. It’s a line Beyoncé walks with supreme confidence."

80 % NOW Magazine

"Pop culture's reigning diva appeared in raw form--a vulnerable mess and unapologetically enraged as she thematically confronted her husband and father's alleged infidelity publicly, through visceral imagery and emotionally loaded sonic offerings."

80 % The 405

"Lemonade is strikingly varied. ... Where her huge team fails to innovate is on the album’s drab middle few cuts about acceptance and forgiveness--chief among them the horrible hoedown ‘Daddy Lessons’, which blends whooping with boring rhymes (“Daddy made me fight / It wasn't always right”). But the final four tracks see quality return, and penultimate track ‘All Night’, in particular, is one of Beyoncé’s most nuanced vocal performances to date."

80 % New Musical Express (NME)

"The difference is that those albums [Anti and The Life Of Pablo] were at best a bold and intriguing mess: the sense that the artists behind them were having trouble marshalling their ideas was hard to escape. Lemonade, however, feels like a success, made by someone very much in control."

80 % The Guardian

"The cathartic and wounded moments here resonate in a manner matched by few, if any, of Beyoncé's contemporaries. She sometimes eclipses herself in terms of raw emotion, as on the throttling Jack White encounter "Don't Hurt Yourself." At the low-volume end, there's more power in the few seconds she chokes back tears while singing "Come back"--timed with the backing vocal in Isaac Hayes' version of "Walk on By"--than there is in most contemporary ballads."

70 % AllMusic

"If Lemonade feels less ambitious than the near-70-minute Beyoncé, it's probably because the penetrating spoken-word interludes, composed of verses by Somali-British poet Warsan Shire, featured in Lemonade's accompanying long-form music video have been excised from the album itself."

70 % Slant Magazine