Beyoncé Just Dropped A Surprise New Single, And The Video Is Damn Powerful

After an eerily quiet 2015, Beyoncé has opened up the heavens and surprise-dropped her first new song in over a year. It’s called ‘Formation’, and its respective music video is a truly 10/10 production. The new track comes a mere week after her collaboration with Coldplay was released (which wasn’t not controversial), and she’s performing both at the Super Bowl 50 halftime show tomorrow.

‘Formation’ has a bit of a trap beat, and is more along the lines of her last single ‘7/11’. In the video, which was partially filmed in New Orleans and features her daughter Blue Ivy, Bey poses as a Southern Belle in a fancy mansion, dances with a crew in an empty swimming pool and hangs out the window of a car doing donuts in a car park. It’s extremely cool.

It’s also a protest video, and coincides with Black History Month in the US. There’s a huge nod to the Black Lives Matter movement, where a line of cops in riot gear face a young black boy break-dancing in front of a wall painted with “stop shooting us”. There’s also imagery evoking Hurricane Katrina — the video closes quite spectacularly with Beyoncé on top of a cop car that’s sinking in a flooded residential street. If that didn’t close the deal, there’s also a Martin Luther King Jr reference.

You’re never not going to watch this.

Pretty much:

god is a black woman.

— Another Round (@anotherround) February 6, 2016

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‘Formation’ is available for free on Tidal.