It’s been a long five years since Queen Bey blessed us with music.
This is it, folks: Beyoncè has finally confirmed that new “music is coming” after being in the studio “for a year and a half.”
The decorated Grammy winner recently grace the September issue cover of Harper’s Bazaar, to which she teased that she’s been taking her time experimenting and that her next record will usher in a “renaissance.”
“With all the isolation and injustice over the past year, I think we are all ready to escape, travel, love, and laugh again,” the icon shared to Harper’s Bazaar. “I feel a renaissance emerging, and I want to be part of nurturing that escape in any way possible.”
Explaining why the creative process has taken such a long period, Beyoncè told the publication that she’s been very particular about every small detail. “”Sometimes it takes a year for me to personally search through thousands of sounds to find just the right kick or snare. One chorus can have up to 200 stacked harmonies.”
Still, there’s nothing like the amount of love, passion, and healing that I feel in the recording studio,” said the Freedom hitmaker, who turns 40 in September. “After 31 years, it feels just as exciting as it did when I was 9 years old. Yes, the music is coming!”
The last sign we saw of Queen Bey’s solo music career was 2016’s Lemonade, which was dubbed by Associated Press as the greatest album of the decade and was nominated for nine Grammy awards in 2017. Since then, she’s only worked on collaborative projects: Everything is Love, which she recorded with husband Jay-Z in 2018; The Lion King: The Gift, the soundtrack which accompanied the 2019 live-action film by Disney; and Homecoming: The Live Album, which simultaneously debuted alongside a concert film covering her 2018 Coachella set on Netflix.
In the interim, she’s also worked on Black is King, the visual film companion to The Lion King soundtrack she worked on. Black Parade, the song which played on the film’s end credits, earned her record 28th Grammy win for Best R&B Performance, making Beyoncè the most decorated female artist in the award show’s history.
