Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album about Black identity, love, and betrayal is Lemonade.
Lemonade was released on April 23, 2016, after an HBO premiere of its accompanying hour-long film. The album combines R&B, pop, hip-hop, rock, country, blues, and soul, creating a deliberately broad musical portrait. Its themes include infidelity, family history, race, womanhood, forgiveness, and cultural heritage.
The project was accompanied by a film divided into chapters such as “Intuition,” “Denial,” and “Redemption.” It drew on the work of the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire, whose writing appears in the film’s spoken passages.
The album became Beyoncé’s sixth consecutive number-one album in the United States and earned the Grammy nomination for Album of the Year. It is sometimes called only an album, but Beyoncé and its distributors specifically presented it as a visual album because the music and film were designed as one project.