She’s pop’s Damien Hirst: Beyoncé’s Renaissance reviewed

You feel a little sorry for Renaissance, the first solo album by Beyoncé in more than six years. It just wants to dance, but will anybody let it? Such are the claims made for the singer as a cultural figure – superwoman, warrior queen, saviour of Black America – that everything she does carries a weight of expectation which would crush granite, let alone a pop record.

The songs on her last album, Lemonade, released in 2016, spun out from the infidelity of her husband, Jay-Z, linking a personal breach of trust to fissures in her family history and racial divides in the United States, past and present. It was impressive but stern. That summer, I saw Beyoncé perform in a football stadium in Sunderland, drilled to the max in the drizzle, and the effect was positively brutalist.

Lemonade came with an entire audio-visual accompaniment. Film soundtracks and a so-so collaboration with her husband have followed. These multimedia mission statements severed, at least partially, a direct connection to the mainstream. The music began to feel subordinate to the message. You wonder whether in the past few years some brave soul took Beyoncé aside and made the point that even an icon needs hit singles – and she hadn’t had any of those for a while. No Beyoncé album will ever have a problem garnering attention, but in the age of TikTok she has to work a little harder than before for people to actively listen to the damn thing.

Thus, Renaissance is less concerned about telling us the time of day than urging us to make good use of the hours. The aim is post-pandemic positivity – personal and communal – rather than empowerment. There is no visual concept, no faff.