Beyonce is back, and she's decided it's a summer to rediscover yourself and dance.

Ms. Carter is getting ready to bring the world to her seventh studio album this Friday.

Rumors are already swirling about what genres she'll showcase, what themes she'll explore, and more.

Because even if you don't care for her, you know that Beyonce's iconic, a total game changer.

But how did she get there and how does she continue to remain relevant?

I'm Gustav Ariano. You're listening to The Times, Daily Deeds from the LA Times.

It's Monday, July 25, 2022.

Today, a fanboy or fan girl or fan person meditation on Beyonce and her upcoming release, Renaissance.

It's summer, folks, so surrender to her groove.

Yeah. So surrender to her groove. Here to talk about all this is Michael Wood, L.A. Times pop music critic and fellow member like me of The Beehive. Michael, welcome to Times. Thanks, Gustavo. Good to be here. Okay, so Beyonce's most recent single, Break My Soul. What do you think of it? It's great. What a song, man. Really just going right for the sort of zeitgeist. I love it. I mean, a great beat, a great groove.

It's got that great sample of Big Frida.

The New Orleans bounce icon and just like a great growly vocal performance from Beyonce.

Everybody. Everybody. growly vocal performance from Beyonce.

I love it when she does sort of pretty R&B singing, but I also love it when she gets kind of down and dirty, which she definitely is doing on this one. And, you know, it's

interesting. Beyonce is maybe the most alert pop star that we have in the world. And she's always kind of looking

at what's going on. And I think that there's a little bit of a connection with a larger cultural

moment right now with this song. You know, there's kind of a wave of 90s to like early Y2K

nostalgia among young people. We're talking about low-rise jeans and mini-skirts. And this song

kind of harkens back to like a 90s house music vibe that really comes through in that way.

It makes you think that she's sort of paying attention to that throwback. Yeah, right off the bat

when I heard it, like took me back to my high school and college years and not to any parties, of course. I'm talking about radio, but those xylophone sound just at the very beginning, like kind of pinging onto it. I'm like, yep, this is house music. This is a house party. This is a place for us to just jam. There's sort of a brewing house music revival, Drake, who's always kind of in dialogue with modern pop music as well. He put

out a record a couple weeks ago called Honestly Nevermind, which is like pretty much like a full

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