Beyonce Releases Surprise Album In The Middle Of The Night - iTunes Briefly Breaks - Internet Goes Ballistic

Beyonce has shocked music fans releasing a surprise album - simply titled Beyonce - on iTunes in the middle of the night. The track consists of 14 songs and 17 music videos.

According to The Daily Mail (via Gizmodo), the album briefly crashed the iTunes store, where it was exclusively released.

The release has made the internet gone nuts.

Beyonce, and a bunch of related terms are trending on Twitter.

Instagram is filled with images like these.

As for what people are saying about the album, here's Ebony with an early review:

Turns out, this Houston rocket was just a little creatively bored. "I'm climbing up the walls 'cause all the sh*t I hear is boring/All the sh*t I do is boring/All these record labels boring," she spits spoken-word style on "Haunted." Many Beyoncé tracks ("Haunted" included) open with samples of childhood highs that recall the promo picture of her "Bow Down" single: tweenage Bey surrounded by dozens of trophies. But here when she says "perfectionism is so…," you can almost hear the shrug in her shoulders. And when she starts to chant repeatedly about "people working nine-to-five just to stay alive" and wondering "how come," she connects the boredom of mega-stardom to the everyday world-weariness we're all used to.

Beyoncé mainly features futuristic, sometimes tribal, mid-tempo tracks from songwriters and producers Timbaland, Pharrell, Frank Ocean, Justin Timberlake, The-Dream, Hit Boy and others. Many songs shift midway through, abandoning original ideas for altogether different grooves like Donna Summer disco classics of old or Timberlake's recent 20/20 Experience records. Sex is blatantly on the table too, in a way that may put Miss Carter's sterling role model reputation at risk. Tsk, tsk.

Surely this will dominate much of the pop media's conversations today.