Review: Beyoncé Makes ‘Lemonade’ Out of Marital Strife

Marital strife smolders, explodes and uneasily subsides on “Lemonade” (Parkwood Entertainment), the album Beyoncé flash-released on Saturday night. “You can taste the dishonesty/It’s all over your breath” are the first words she sings in “Pray You Catch Me,” and that’s just the beginning of an album that probes betrayal, jealousy, revenge and rage before dutifully willing itself toward reconciliation at the end. Many of the accusations are aimed specifically and recognizably at her husband, Shawn Carter, the rapper Jay Z. “Tonight I regret the night I put that ring on,” she talk-sings in “Sorry,” a twitchy, flippant song that’s by no means an apology. It’s a combative, unglossy track on an album full of them.

“Lemonade” is the kind of album that a star like Beyoncé (as well as, lately, Rihanna) can release in the streaming era because she’s already guaranteed attention for her every utterance. The album is not beholden to radio formats or presold by a single; fans are likely to explore the whole album, streaming every track and hearing how far afield — a brass band, stomping blues-rock, ultraslow avant-R&B — Beyoncé is willing to go. As she did with her 2013 album, “Beyoncé,” she has also paired the music with full-length video that expands and deepens its impact.

On their own, the songs can be taken as one star’s personal, domestic dramas, waiting to be mined by the tabloids. But with the video, they testify to situations and emotions countless women endure. It’s not a divorce announcement; the singer, songwriter and director is credited as Beyoncé Knowles Carter.

Beyoncé released “Lemonade” online at 10 p.m. on April 23, immediately after the HBO showing of the hourlong “visual album” version. It’s a quick-cutting music video that intersperses the songs, and broadens them, with compelling poetry from the Somali-British writer Warsan Shire, poems that often extend women’s physicality toward the archetypal. As Beyoncé recites them, Ms. Shire’s words radically reframe the songs, so they are no longer one woman’s struggles but tribulations shared through generations of mothers and daughters. The video is filled with images of female solidarity and of family, Southern and African roots, women of all ages and roles and eras. Often, Beyoncé is joined by African-American women in white clothes enacting shared work, gatherings of women or eerie communal rituals. Beyoncé, in multiple hairstyles and fashions, is shown both alluring and unglamorous: hard-faced, unhappy, sweaty, harshly lit. For the last few songs she often appears in a puffy-sleeved antebellum-style dress remade with fabric patterns derived from African textiles, a rich twist.

The album title comes from a family gathering that’s shown in the video and heard on a track: the 90th birthday of Hattie White, Jay Z’s grandmother, who says, “I was served lemons but I made lemonade.”