The day earlier than the July launch of Renaissance, Beyoncé’s seventh studio album, her administration group announced in a press assertion that the report wouldn’t embrace visuals as a part of its rollout. “It is a chance again to be listeners and not viewers,” it learn. The alternative was odd, if slightly disappointing, for the only real undeniable fact that Beyoncé persists as one of many foremost image-makers of our time. The shock launch of the singer’s self-titled album, in 2013, and of Lemonade, in 2016, had been accompanied by a wide ranging suite of music movies that rewrote the principles of contemporary artistry. (The assortment of videos for Lemonade premiered as a movie on HBO.) Nowadays, when she does “speak” exterior of an album cycle, it’s primarily via expertly curated Instagram posts, which in flip turn into the topic of limitless fan theories. So the truth that Renaissance would enter the world with out its personal visible language was, nicely, kinda baffling.

Images are the dominant report this period. We exist in and throughout screens. We yearn to make ourselves seen, and our most prescient social media apps enable for such an alternate. YouTube was the inspiration of our wanting, a bottomless video bazaar that gave on a regular basis customers the ability to create what they wished, to be who they wished. Instagram was, for a time, a seductress, unimaginable to reside with out. Influencers constructed a whole financial system across the idea of being watched. More just lately, TikTok has turn into the new frontier of cultural manufacturing, the place shifting pictures flicker throughout our iPhones with a persuasive, virtually irresistible kineticism.

As the digital age turned a surreal inevitability of my on a regular basis life, social media magnified my looking exponentially, a virtually exhaustive lens via which I peered. It is a province for me to find and check that means; that means usually derived from all method of visible renderings. As I’ve written previously, pictures make us true. Memes and GIFs are the authoritative vernacular in nearly all of my group chats. There are nights the place I stalk the checkered grid of hookup apps with a feverish obsession, scrolling in the potential of what I see and the promise of all the things these squared snapshots—angled faces, cropped brown our bodies—can provide. Even TV’s bloated streaming age has supplied a nicely of content material and imagery that I regularly devour. The pictures are throughout us. It appears solely pure to crave extra, to wish to discover new permutations to outline ourselves.

But then I listened to Renaissance. And listened and listened and listened. And I understood. Its songs are supposed to reside in us, not essentially as a mirrored image of Beyoncé’s inventive invention however as a reminder of our personal improbable chance despite the encircling hardship. She wasn’t alone on this artistic endeavor. Other marquee artists this 12 months tried related detours, making music meant to be skilled on a extra analog, human degree. 

Listening to Drake can, at instances, really feel like watching the History Channel filtered via TikTok. A shameless interloper, if an keen scholar of the previous, his six solo albums are a collage of worldwide influences, a siphoning of native scenes, sounds, and sensibilities. The most up-to-date, Honestly, Nevermind, was surprise-released in June. Like Renaissance, what I beloved about it was the way it veered into the neon mist of the dance ground, searching for a extra analog second when digital terrains didn’t dictate a lot of how we work together, create, and make ourselves. In Drake’s case, he drew inspiration from Baltimore and Jersey membership music, setting the temper with leg-twisting manufacturing from home luminaries like Black Coffee. Bad Bunny’s and Kendrick Lamar’s respective albums additionally implored us to get on our ft and transfer this 12 months. Even now I can hear it; the quake of Bad Bunny rapping “Titi me pregunto,” its personal type of summer time spell, booming from metropolis blocks, the power of New Yorkers extra alive than ever. It was the sound of a metropolis, of many cities worldwide, discovering their means once more.

It’s been 5 months because the launch of Renaissance, and the decision for visuals has not quieted one bit. But that craving misses the purpose. Renaissance’s spirit was by no means about what it might wholly envision via Beyoncé’s eyes. We had been her canvas all alongside, our our bodies in movement, our pleasure realized, had been the very pictures we sought. The music—buoyant, abundantly Black, and completely queer—turned us into our personal avatars of creation and that means, prisms of pleasure and resilience. Whether it was singing the traces “comfortable in my skin” on “Cozy,” randomly blurting out “unique!!” and even dropping your self within the glowing manufacturing of “Virgo’s Groove” on a Friday night time, that was the place the album most got here alive, and the place it was meant to be seen. Those are the pictures that endure. Renaissance’s most compelling imagery will all the time be us, collectively, celebrating ourselves.

In March I misplaced a buddy to suicide, and by summer time’s finish I’d lose my grandmother to dementia. There had been different losses too. It was a 12 months when all the things felt massive and darkish and finite. The music that referred to as to me, that saved me, supplied the inverse: It was brilliant and messy and profoundly weak. It supplied readability. It lifted the lingering fog. The better of the 12 months’s musicians bought us shifting once more—to not the workplace, that bygone invention of pre-pandemic life, however again into the world, and again onto the dance ground, the place the kindred embrace of associates and new flames was like a conjuring, and the swoosh of our bodies towards each other a balm. All of us radiating with electrical energy and intention. All of us rebuilding life within the thick, ongoing aftermath of demise.