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Aug 2, 2022The catalog of touchstones, samples, and cameos on Renaissance could double as a syllabus for a master class on the evolution of dance music as it has unfolded during Beyoncé's lifetime.
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Aug 1, 2022Wild and ravishing “Renaissance,” which came out Friday and immediately reshaped the conversation about 2022’s most important music. ... “Renaissance” is miles ahead of the competition. ... It’s like a carefully curated library, this whole thing, with an astonishing depth of knowledge regarding rhythm and harmony that puts Beyoncé as an arranger and bandleader on a level with Prince and Stevie Wonder.
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Aug 1, 2022Beyoncé’s singing here transcends any price tag. The range of her voice nears the galactic; the imagination powering it qualifies as cinema. ... Its sense of adventure is off the genre’s map, yet very much aware of every coordinate. It’s an achievement of synthesis that never sounds slavish or synthetic. These songs are testing this music, celebrating how capacious it is, how pliable.
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Aug 1, 2022While less vulnerable than Lemonade, RENAISSANCE takes the reins as Beyoncé's grandest record to date because of the technical achievements in production and seemingly effortless experimentation without losing any of her lyrical cool. ... Beyoncé's RENAISSANCE is a modern classic.
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Jul 29, 2022While not a perfect album, Renaissance is pretty damn close. It’s infectious and not overbearing, elegant, but not shallow.
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Aug 9, 2022Renaissance derives its meaning through its diverse soundscape, which, due to Beyoncé’s astute curation, becomes a statement about letting the music speak for itself.
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Aug 4, 2022Renaissance is both backward-looking and forward-thinking. A colorful, euphoric and glittery celebration of what has passed and what is still to come.
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Aug 3, 2022The LP is top-to-bottom danceable and sequenced with each track setting up the next, through the ecstatic finale, where Beyoncé most potently mixes sensuality and aggression, claiming her man with nods to Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, Patrick Cowley, and Larry Heard.
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Aug 3, 2022Beyoncé mostly eschews polished vocal performances in favour of expression, with the intricate vocal runs that wrap up Plastic Off The Sofa a notable exception, and while the explosive final verse of Heated is being edited at time of writing its raw and spontaneous quality is intensely satisfying.
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Aug 1, 2022“Renaissance” (volume one of three) is sticky, sweaty, hedonistic art — flanked by a pastiche of genres that never lingers on long enough for the listener to get too comfortable. It’s what makes the collection its own kind of masterpiece: beauty in the chaos.
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Aug 1, 2022If ‘RENAISSANCE’ doesn’t convince you that a star with nothing to prove continues to produce sprawling bodies of work that are editorially precise, prismatic and rhythmically audacious, nothing will.
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Aug 1, 2022Renaissance is a commanding prescription to be perceived again, without judgment. Listening to the album, you can feel the synapses coming back together one by one, basking in the unfamiliar sensation of feeling good, if only for its hour-long duration.
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Jul 29, 2022Is this an evolution from Lemonade? Not quite. But with Renaissance, Beyoncé is more relatable than ever, giving listeners all the anthems and sultry slow burners we love and have come to expect from her, proving that inclusivity is the new black.
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Jul 28, 2022Renaissance is one of Beyoncé’s best albums to date: it doesn’t walk in the footsteps of its predecessors but instead makes its own path, going to places we didn’t think Beyoncé would go. The six years since her last effort have well and truly been worth the wait.
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Aug 1, 2022It’s an album expressing the joys of love – physical, verbal, musical, familial and all the other kinds. While she’s the one in the spotlight throughout the album, this isn’t a record about her – instead she’s honouring all those people who find themselves through the release provided by these communal spaces. And damn, it’s a hell of a good time.
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MojoSep 21, 2022A continuous mix of hedonism, virtuosity, scholarship and, as one of her disco antecedents would have it, Good Times. [Nov 2022, p.84]
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UncutAug 31, 2022Beyoncé's seventh solo album is a flawlessly structured feast. [Oct 2022, p.25]
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Aug 9, 2022Unlike 2016’s iconic ‘Lemonade’, ‘Renaissance’ firmly embodies this world. No ballads or break up songs necessary, the album sits proudly at 16 tracks of pure energy. A masterclass in reinvention.
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Aug 8, 2022These sour notes aside [Energy and Heated], Renaissance is the feelgood manifesto that puts all the other post-pandemic party albums in the shade, a song cycle crammed full of homages to the historic continuum of Black dancefloor therapy.
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Jul 29, 2022Due in part to its tonal variety and expert sequencing, Renaissance never feels monotonous, despite its near-relentless forward motion.
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Jul 29, 2022That there are spots of filler on the first hour of Beyonce’s new trilogy suggests we’re in for indulgence, but that there are brisk bangers and Lemonade-like leaps of genre too bodes well for Beyonce’s defiant emotional renaissance.
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Jul 29, 2022There is little Beyoncé has to prove to anyone 25 years down the line, but the start of this “three act project” proves that she’s still able to push herself and delve into new sonics, styles and ethos.
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Jul 28, 2022This is a vast superclub of an album. But for all its inventiveness, its flavours exist within fairly narrow parameters. Still, these songs will be blasted out of cars, at house parties, in hotel rooms and on dance floors for years to come.
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Jul 28, 2022Touted as Act I of a confirmed trilogy, Renaissance falls short of being Beyoncé’s best full-length, but it still fulfils her liberationist aims. ... Her sense of freedom throughout is palpable, and an infectious spur to action.
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Aug 2, 2022Renaissance succeeds as a post-Covid soiree and massive PR campaign, though one can’t help but note that the album occasionally sports more style than substance.
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Aug 9, 2022Beyoncé is clearly itching to experiment with her sound. This latest album may not be her most cohesive release, but it does come with a handful of well-executed surprises. ... The album falls flat when it tries too hard to immerse itself in a culture that does not belong to Beyoncé.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 2,997 out of 3470
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Mixed: 84 out of 3470
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Negative: 389 out of 3470
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