Beyonce, Jay-Z Drop New Album ‘Everything Is Love’ During OTRII Tour
Update: Beyoncé and Jay-Z‘s joint album Everything Is Love is streaming on Spotify, Apple Music and is available to download via Amazon Music.
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Beyoncé and Jay-Z have always been
experts at holding onto secrets, and today they revealed two. The first is that
they have released a new, nine-track collaborative album under the name the
Carters, titled Everything Is Love,
which is available now via the streaming service Tidal; the two artists are co-owners
of the company. The second is that they somehow managed to shoot a video for
one of the songs, “Apeshit,” in Paris’ famed art museum the Louvre
sometime last month with director Ricky Saiz, who previously led up Beyoncé’s
“Yoncé” video.
The video is stunning with its wide shots of halls of art with no tourists in them – only Jay-Z and Beyoncé standing looking serene, like works of arts themselves, in front of “The Mona Lisa.” And then the beat kicks in, with a shot of them on a staircase with nearly nude bodies strewn about the steps that contract and move to the rhythm. “I can’t believe we made it,” she sings, a little Autotune in her voice, over a hard-hitting beat. “This is why we thankful, hey, hell, see a crowd going apeshit.” The couple are shown in front of “The Winged Victory of Samothrace,” “The Coronation of Napoleon,” among many other famed pieces of priceless artworks and antiquities, while dancing and posing.
Beyoncé also announced the record via Instagram a little before 3 p.m. PT on Saturday. The couple was in London, where they were performing together at London Stadium on their joint On the Run II tour. It was there that Beyoncé told the crowd about the album to a round of thunderous applause and cheers – handing out cards for six-month free Tidal subscriptions to the audience – before the words ‘Album Out Now,’ flashed across a screen at the stadium.
The couple kicked off its On the Run II tour in the U.K. a couple of weeks ago with a gig in Cardiff, Wales. Like the “Apeshit” video, it was a spectacle to behold. In a review of the show, Rolling Stone wrote, “Such was the sensory overload that occasionally you felt, as with an all-action blockbuster movie, that you might need to see this tour more than once to catch every nuance. And, as with such movies, a happy ending was inevitable.”
The couple will kick off a North American leg of the tour late next month in Cleveland. It will go through October, when it wraps in Seattle.
Beyoncé released her last album, Lemonade, as a feature-length HBO film in 2016; it was streamable only on Tidal for nearly two months. Her previous LP, Beyoncé, was a surprise release. Jay-Z put out his most recent record, 4:44, with a more traditional rollout, but was made available first to Sprint and Tidal customers.
Everything Is Love track list:
1. “Summer”
2. “Apes**t”
3. “Boss”
4. “Nice”
5. “713”
6. “Friends”
7. “Heard About Us”
8. “Black Effect”
9. “Lovehappy”