Lemonade is Queen Bey’s sixth album, described as “a conceptual project based on every woman’s journey of self-knowledge and healing.” It consists of twelve songs with features from artists including Kendrick Lamar, The Weeknd, and James Blake. As with its immediate predecessor, BEYONCÉ (2013), it was released as both a surprise and a visual album; unlike BEYONCÉ, which featured individual music videos for each track, the Lemonade visual album took the form of an hour-long film. The film version of Lemonade premiered on HBO on April 23, 2016. Beyoncé had previously teamed up with HBO to debut her 2013 documentary Life Is But a Dream and in 2014 to film her On the Run Tour. Lemonade was promoted as a documentary style special in the same vein as Life Is But a Dream. Lemonade was preceded by the Black Power anthem and album closer “Formation.” Lemonade was initially only available for TIDAL, but was finally added to Spotify and Apple Music three years after its release, on April 23, 2019. Lemonade has been featured on several “best of” lists. Several publications, including Billboard, Complex, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, Stereogum, and The Guardian named Lemonade as the top album of 2016. In 2025, Rolling Stone named Lemonade as the best album of the 21st Century (so far), saying: Lemonade has always been more than just an album. It’s a music film as layered, gorgeous, and haunting as a canonical drama, a matrix of generational heartbreak, a celebration of legacy, and a hand-drawn map to the intersections of many Black women’s interpersonal and political lives. […] Put simply, Lemonade solidified [Beyoncé’s] status among the best musicians of all time.