Beyoncé’s 2016 album built around themes of infidelity, race, and family is Lemonade.
Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records released Lemonade on April 23, 2016. It began as a visual album, with its songs presented alongside an hour-long film that premiered on HBO. The project draws on R&B, rock, country, blues, pop, and hip-hop.
Its narrative moves through emotional stages including intuition, denial, anger, apathy, accountability, hope, and redemption. The album also connects personal experience with Black history, African diasporic imagery, motherhood, and family heritage.
Lemonade is sometimes described only as a breakup album, but that is incomplete. Its scope includes marriage and reconciliation as well as race, womanhood, cultural memory, and the relationship between Beyoncé and her daughter Blue Ivy.