Consult the oracles; toss the bones; divine from the entrails what ye may: Beyoncé has been giving signs of life of late.
It has, in case you’d lost track, been six years since the Bey Hive was activated into endless, buzzing life by the release of Lemonade, Beyoncé’s 2016 mega-hit album. Said compilation was, in addition to its considerable artistic merits, one of the biggest surprise album drops of all time, sending shockwaves through the musical industry, and haunting for years afterwards the dreams of those of us tasked with covering this kind of thing, because obviously, we know not the hour nor the day.
Hence the almost obsessive Bey-watching the press has been doing Beyoncéward of late, as signs begin to crop up that something might be on its way soon. Seemingly innocuous stuff—like a recent erasure of all her pictures on social media—take on a sinister and portentous light when you remember that Beyoncé did something similar in the run up to Lemonade. Things are moving around on her web site in strange ways, including revealing a blank entry titled “What is a B7?” if you search for today’s date. (Lemonade was her sixth album! The next would be B7! As long as we’re not counting Lion King: The Gift/Black Is King! Which we don’t think we are!) Her mom liked a tweet about Beyoncé working on something new! IT ALL MAKES COMPLETE AND TOTAL SENSE! WE CAN SEE THE DIVINE TIDAL INFINITE!
Okay, sorry. Sorry! We let the sheer mystery of this devious puzzlemaster’s tricks and traps send us over an edge that can only be properly conveyed through GIFs of Charlie Day in It’s Always Sunny. The point is, something is going on in Beyoncé Land, and our base efforts to read the signs and portents suggest it might be a new album, some time soon. Gird whatever you’ve got that you gotta gird to prepare yourself for the sudden onslaught.
