- Beyoncé's seventh studio album "Renaissance" has been named Insider's album of the year.
- "Renaissance" feels more like an hour-long immersive experience than a collection of 16 songs.
It's difficult to explain why "Renaissance" is the star of 2022's music scene because it seems so obvious.
This is a no-skips album in the purest sense. Employing her trademark perfectionism, Beyoncé crafted a tracklist that demands your full attention, resisting fragmentation at every turn; all 16 songs are unique and arresting, but made immeasurably stronger by their counterparts. Every transition, beat switch, and evocative lyric is expertly crafted to pull you deeper into its orbit.
"Renaissance" feels more like an hour-long immersive experience than a collection of songs. If I start listening and I'm forced to pause midway through, it feels so wrong.
Indeed, ever since its release in July, bars and clubs across the country (especially those with a rainbow flag hanging in the window) have been hosting events just to play the album in its entirety, which was precisely the artist's intention.
Beyoncé has been making music at a peerless level for nearly a decade now, but togetherness, community, and gratitude are essential to the ethos of 'Renaissance'
The album is emphatically queer, indebted to the Black and brown creators of bounce, deep house, techno, and ballroom.
Rather than quietly folding these styles and sounds into her own brand, Beyoncé made this connection clear and inextricable from the jump. The album's lead single "Break My Soul" prominently samples the 2014 song "Explode" by the iconic diva Big Freedia. Queer legends like Kevin Aviance, Moi Renee, Honey Dijon, and Ts Madison appear elsewhere on the tracklist.
"My intention was to create a safe place, a place without judgment," Beyoncé wrote on her website, making a point to thank "all of the pioneers who originate culture," especially her late Uncle Jonny, who was "the first person to expose me to a lot of the music and culture that serve as inspiration for this album."
The genres that flow through "Renaissance" are vehicles for joy in the LGBTQ community. Gay bars are often seen as refuges from prejudice and hetereonormativity — a place for queer people to gather, unfurl, and, of course, dance.
At a time when these sacred spaces have been targeted by bigots and threatened by gun violence, "Renaissance" feels even more revolutionary.
As Annabel Paulsen noted in an essay for Document, although queer representation has made incredible progress in recent years, our stories are too frequently told through a lens of trauma.
Celebrated films like "Boy Erased," "Dallas Buyers Club," and "Blue Is the Warmest Color" treat queer pain as a prerequisite for empathy. Even feel-good shows like Netflix's "Queer Eye" almost always make time for the traumatic backstories of their hosts and subjects.
"Renaissance" counters that trope by embracing pleasure simply for pleasure's sake. The album is self-indulgent, erotic, and relentlessly fun, and it doesn't stop to question if we deserve to feel this way. It only asks us to celebrate our bodies for allowing us to feel bliss ("Kiss my scars because I love what they made," "Taste me, that fleshy part"). When Beyoncé sings about her own sex appeal and singularity ("Don't even waste your time trying to compete with me," "Never met a girl with a mind like this"), she's not just insisting upon her own greatness, but inviting us to feel the same about ourselves.
Hypnotic, dazzling, and vigorously inclusive, "Renaissance" is so much more than a cluster of bops that make you want to dance. It isn't just another star in the night sky. If 2022 is a galaxy, Beyoncé's seventh album is the sun, and all others are fated to submit to its gravity.
Read Insider's full list of 2022's best albums here.
"Renaissance" was named Insider's best album of 2022. For more of our End of Year Awards, click here.