WASHINGTON: As scheduled, Beyonce dropped her seventh solo album, ‘Renaissance’, which is part one of a “three-part project,” on Thursday night, and called out those who leaked the album two days early, while thanking her fans for being patient.
According to Variety, taking to Instagram, she wrote, “So, the album leaked, and you all actually waited until the proper release time so you all can enjoy it together. I’ve never seen anything like it. I can’t thank y’all enough for your love and protection.”
“I appreciate you for calling out anyone that was trying to sneak into the club early. It means the world to me,” she continued.
The album apparently leaked almost 36 hours before its scheduled release at midnight E.T. on Thursday.
As per Variety, high-quality FLAC files of the album were found by the outlet online and also social media was filled with comments on the leak. Some posts showed CD copies of the album for sale, apparently in Europe.
Unusually, apart from a couple of brief teasers, Beyonce has not released any videos from the new album, even though the first single, ‘Break My Soul’, dropped more than a month ago.
It seems possible that a video collection is a third chapter of the project, which was originally said to comprise two albums. Beyonce released a 65-minute film containing multiple music videos simultaneously with her previous solo album, 2016’s Lemonade’.
Earlier this month, Beyonce shared the album’s cover artwork, which sees her posing regally atop the silhouette of a luminous horse.
In a note accompanying the artwork, she wrote, “Creating this album allowed me a place to dream and to find escape during a scary time for the world. It allowed me to feel free and adventurous in a time when little else was moving.”
Beyonce has released four albums since 2016’s ‘Lemonade’. In 2018, she dropped ‘Everything Is Love’, in April of 2019, she put out ‘Homecoming’, and that summer she followed with ‘The Lion King: The Gift’. (ANI)