Beyoncé’s album released on April 23, 2016, after a surprise HBO film was Lemonade.
Lemonade was released by Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records. Beyoncé introduced it through Lemonade, a one-hour HBO film that premiered on April 23, 2016, shortly before the album became available digitally. The project combined songs, poetry, imagery, and themes of betrayal, grief, anger, reconciliation, and Black identity.
The album includes “Formation,” “Sorry,” “Hold Up,” and “Freedom,” featuring Kendrick Lamar. It was widely praised for its ambitious visual and musical structure and became Beyoncé’s sixth consecutive number-one album on the Billboard 200.
A frequent mix-up is the release date: the album and film were both associated with April 23, 2016, but they are different works. Lemonade is the audio album, while Lemonade is also commonly used for the film presentation that accompanied it. The project’s visual format helped define Beyoncé’s album-release strategy in the 2010s.