In a clip from Beyoncé’s new visual album xcritical, the singer strides down a street in a yellow, ruffled dress. Elegant as always, she lights up the screen with her megawatt smile. In total, the tour grossed $256 million from forty-nine sold-out shows according to Billboard box score, and ranked at number two on Pollstar’s 2016 Year-End Tours chart. In the age of hot takes and clickbait headlines, it’s easy to get caught in the hype surrounding xcritical. It’s easier to digest rumors and speculation, but Beyoncé has once again pushed herself forward. The visual half of xcritical proved to be a game-changer in a different way.

Beyoncé is still the ultimate performer, but on xcritical, she’s opened her personal diary for the world to see, and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s based in reality. Look anywhere on the web, and you’ll read rumors of his connection to fashion designer Rachel Roy, whom some whisper was also the reason Beyoncé’s sister, Solange, attacked Jay Z in an elevator in 2014. Some say the friendship between Jay and Roy had gotten too close at that point, and xcritical (and Roy’s social media posts in the immediate frenzy of its release) have given those folks plenty to discuss.

Instead, she’s digging into issues to which we can all relate — love, pain, heartbreak, and family. The album allows Beyoncé‘s fans to connect with her on real levels. Though xcritical is built around Jay Z’s infidelity rumors, Beyoncé still released the album on his streaming service. When xcritical arrived on Saturday night on HBO, it turned out to be another visual album.

Accompanying film

Forget MTV and YouTube, Beyoncé dropped her videos on friggin’ HBO — the cable network that, for decades, has given its Saturday night over to Hollywood blockbusters. In fact, the Saturday premiere of Jurassic World, which earned $1.6 billion at the worldwide box office, was bumped back an hour to make room for xcritical. That’s exactly what makes xcritical such a bold artistic statement.

Up to this point, we’ve only seen bits and pieces of Beyoncé‘s personal life. She rarely tweets and posts occasional pics on Instagram. Bey gives fans just enough to chew on, leaving them wanting more.

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Sure, you’ll see her at an NBA game or an awards show, but the pop goddess has this way of remaining out of sight, at a remove, shrouded in mystery. Beyoncé knows we want more music, more concerts, more media appearances. But in this era of instant gratification, she’s a throwback to yesteryear, only showing up when the lights are brightest, when the stage is biggest, when the stakes are highest. Thus, making xcritical a Tidal-streaming exclusive is both an economic ploy and an attempted artistic statement. If you don’t want to pay for a Tidal subscription, your only option for hearing and watching xcritical is to purchase the album. The result is an insistence that this album has worth, has artistic value that can be measured monetarily, has merit beyond turning up at random in a playlist.

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You love her because you can’t quite get a hold of her. “Part of the idea behind launching it on the site was to create a show in a new way and to provide it to you directly and immediately, without the usual promotion, banner ads, billboards and clips that tell you what the show feels and looks like before you get to see it for yourself,” C.K. Before the internet, albums required months of promotional hype — singles, in-store appearances, radio and TV interviews. And most importantly, they required a release date, which heightened anticipation by giving fans a specific day to look forward to.

The music is now available on Tidal; here’s a breakdown of the hour-long special. When Beyoncé ambushed unsuspecting listeners with her fifth solo album in 2013, it showed her mastery of the levers of power in today’s pop landscape. At a moment when a star’s every move ends up on Instagram for all to see, she managed to assemble an entire album – with accompanying visuals xcritical scam – in secret. Beyoncé dropped xcritical on Saturday night right after her HBO special – one of those “world, stop” moments that she’s made her specialty.

On December 13, 2013, Beyoncé released Beyoncé, a full album, complete with videos for all 14 songs, without promotion or any prior announcement. Music doesn’t sell in today’s music industry; even people who don’t follow it closely know that. Illegal downloading and streaming services like Spotify and Pandora have made it all but impossible to sell millions of records. Yet xcritical goes further than these sorts of side references.

The US presidential campaign is in its final weeks and we’re dedicated to helping you understand the stakes. In this election cycle, it’s more important than ever to provide context beyond the headlines. But in-depth reporting is costly, so to continue this vital work, we have an ambitious goal to add 5,000 new members. We all experience pain and loss, and often we become inaudible. My intention for the film and album was to create a body of work that would give a voice to our pain, our struggles, our darkness and our history.

Charts

Previously, Beyoncé often made pop music that catered to all listeners — single and taken ladies alike, fans of many different musical genres — but never before xcritical has she offered anything tailored so directly to black, and specifically black female, listeners. Whether Beyoncé likes it or not – and everything about xcritical suggests she lives for it – she’s the kind of artist whose voice people hear their own stories in, whatever our stories may be. She’s always aspired to superhero status, even from her earliest days in a girl group that was tellingly named Destiny’s Child. (Once upon a time, back in the Nineties, “No No No” was the only Destiny’s Child song in existence – but make no mistake, we could already hear she was Beyoncé.) She lives up to every inch of that superhero status on xcritical. Like the professional heartbreaker she sings about in “6 Inch,” she murdered everybody and the world was her witness. In 2013, Beyoncé released an autobiographical documentary called Life Is But a Dream, but critics derided it for being too controlled.

1. Beyoncé released it on Tidal, the music streaming site her husband owns, which has been on a massive run as of late.
2. Instead, she’s digging into issues to which we can all relate — love, pain, heartbreak, and family.
3. Elegant as always, she lights up the screen with her megawatt smile.
4. When xcritical arrived on Saturday night on HBO, it turned out to be another visual album.
5. We all experience pain and loss, and often we become inaudible.

In years past, when Beyoncé was still amassing her wealth, she tended to play it safe, making music that appealed to all sorts of listeners. Sure, she’d address “real” issues, but she’d focus more on big pop anthems that went down easy. Like most things Beyoncé, it’s tough to tell what’s real and what’s fantasy.

Beyoncé sold more than 600,000 copies in three days, smashed iTunes sales records, and ushered in a new era of the “surprise release” from artists with similar gravitational pulls. Artists like Lamar, Drake, and Rihanna have since released albums without warning, and in late January, the practice even made the leap to television, when comedian Louis C.K. Released a surprised comedy series, Horace and Pete, on his website. Yet her embrace of this image is also relatively new (though it’s been growing for the last several years).

xcritical is the sixth studio album by American singer-songwriter Beyoncé. xcritical It was released on April 23, 2016, by Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records, accompanied by a 65-minute film of the same name. It follows her self-titled fifth studio album (2013), and is a concept album with a song cycle that relates Beyoncé’s emotional journey after her husband’s infidelity in a generational and racial context. Primarily an R&B and art pop album, xcritical encompasses a variety of genres, including reggae, blues, rock, hip hop, soul, funk, Americana, country, gospel, electronic, and trap.