Beyoncé Releasing New Album 'Renaissance' in July

Beyoncé marked her return to music with a photo shoot for British Vogue.  

After two weeks of cryptic clues that had the Beyhive abuzz that their Queen B was on the verge of releasing new music, the Beyoncé stans were vindicated Thursday morning when their liege's record label took to social media to officially announce her seventh studio album.

Posting an image of a black square with "act i" and "RENAISSANCE" written in white on each side, the record label captioned the post: "Beyoncé. RENAISSANCE. July 29."

Tidal, the streaming music service formerly owned by her husband Jay-Z (who still retains a board seat) before he sold it to Square for $297 million last year, posted a similar message at the same time.

While the details of the album have yet to be officially revealed, BeyLegion shared a screenshot implying that the project will have 16 tracks.

The star's self-proclaimed "biggest fansite" has a solid record of breaking legitimate news about its subject.

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"Renaissance" is the 40-year-old's first solo since 2016's critically acclaimed triple-platinum album "Lemonade."

During the six-year gap, she kept busy with collaborative projects. In 2018 she released "Everything Is Love" with Jay-Z, and in 2019 she curated and was heavily featured on "Lion King: The Gift" a soundtrack for Disney's live-action adaptation of the classic animated movie. She also released "Homecoming: The Live Album" that same year, which features live renditions of some of her biggest hits. In 2022 she earned an Oscar nomination for her song “Be Alive,” which was featured in King Richard.

An interview with Vogue's Rafael Pavarotti, done in conjunction with Beyoncé's cover shoot for British Vogue's July issue, sheds a little light on the project. In an excerpt, the longtime fan wrote:

She then asked me if I wanted to hear her new music. As someone who first saw her perform live with Destiny’s Child 23 years ago, a moment’s walk from my family home when the group played at the Notting Hill Carnival in 1999, I can feel the tingling excitement build as we make our way to her home recording studio. With minimal ceremony, she takes her laptop and plugs it in as we all sit on some sofas. Quietly, the superstar hits play on her upcoming album.

Instantly, a wall of sound hits me. Soaring vocals and fierce beats combine and in a split second I’m transported back to the clubs of my youth. I want to get up and start throwing moves. It’s music I love to my core. Music that makes you rise, that turns your mind to cultures and subcultures, to our people past and present, music that will unite so many on the dance floor, music that touches your soul. As ever with Beyoncé, it is all about the intent. I sit back, after the wave, absorbing it all.

Four unique box sets are currently available for pre-order on Beyoncé's website. Every purchase includes a CD, T-shirt, mini-poster and a 28-page photo booklet.

Megan Thee Stallion Opens Up About Tory Lanez Shooting

Megan Thee Stallion has been relatively quiet lately about the 2020 shooting incident that forced her to get surgery on both feet and left fellow rapper Tory Lanez facing a maximum sentence of 22 years and eight months in state prison if convicted of the crime.

However, with the case headed to trial in September, the Houston rapper and entrepreneur is once again breaking her silence on what happened that night following internet backlash that has mostly kept her mum on the subject other than an April interview with CBS’ Gayle King.

"I want him to go to jail,” Megan Thee Stallion told Rolling Stone in a no-holds-barred interview published Wednesday. “I want him to go under the jail.”

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The 27 year-old-rapper, who is the cover model for the magazine's July/August Hot Issue, elaborated on what happened that night and decried the role social media played in denying her victimhood.

"In some kind of way I became the villain," she said. "I wonder if it’s because of the way I look. Is it because I’m not light enough? Is it that I’m not white enough? Am I not the shape? The height? Because I’m not petite? Do I not seem like I’m worth being treated like a woman?”

Megan Thee Stallion, who previously stated that the catalyst for the incident was an argument that broke out between her, Lanez, and her ex-best friend Kelsey Harris as they left a pool party because the rapper was "ready to go, and everybody else wasn't ready to go, was scared that she would not be able to be herself anymore after the shooting.

"What nobody knows is, I had to get the surgery the same night. I stayed in the hospital in California for maybe four days," she said, adding that after her hospital stay she wasn't able to walk.

Megan Thee Stallion added, "I still have bullet fragments in my feet right now." Lanez, whose real name Daystar Peterson, was ordered into custody by a judge in April after he violated a protective order by harassing Megan Thee Stallion online. The judge said some of his tweets appeared to be direct messages to the star, but he was released hours later after posting bail.

The pretrial hearing is scheduled for July 28, with the trial set to begin Sept.14.

TMNT Game Features New Track by Ghostface Killah and Raekwon the Chef

Courtesy Art: Dotemu 

Fans of the Foot and Wu-Tang Clans rejoice.

Tribute Games is releasing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge this month, and it appears to be the best kind of throwback.

Publisher Dotemu says the latest release in the long-running turtle's franchise "gnarly game design takes you back to the ’80s," and with most of the original voice cast on board the nostalgia is thick. But for music fans its the inevitable joining of forces with New York's other greatest martial arts family that delivers the hype.

Wu-Tang's Ghostface Killah and Raekwon the Chef's contribution of “We Ain’t Came to Lose" to the soundtrack cements the ties between dysfunctional warrior brotherhoods while at the same time offering franchise fans something Vanilla Ice's "Ninja Rap" could never do — a certifiable TMNT banger.

Peppered with bars harder than a roundhouse kick to the head the track elevates ninja-rap to an art form:

With heroes in the half shell going to war, got the city on the siege and they holdin’ the fort, got extra-large pizza boxes all on the floor, get sized up by negative thoughts, your time’s up on whatever you thought, individual starvin’ the floor, so the samurai’s sword on point for the course, dangerous metals, high like the rain and Terra, the twilight meets the brain of Shredder, all for one and trained together…

The move comes seven years after the Pharma Bro, Martin Shkreli, caused a great imbalance in the music world's Chi by snapping up the only copy of the Wu-Tang Clan's last album "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin" — which at the time meant most of us would be dead by the time the group's seventh studio effort would be commercially available (2103) thanks to an ironclad purchaser's agreement.

Following Shkreli's incarceration for securities fraud "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin" was seized by federal agents to help pay his debts and eventually sold in 2021 to crypto collective PleasrDAO for $4 million. PleasrDAO said they hoped to make it more widely accessible, but until then this effort from two of the group's finest should help satiate Wu-Tang fans' thirst for new music from the Slums of Shaolin. 

Preview the entire track below.

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