Beyonce and Jay Z Watch Waves Break in ‘Drunk in Love’
For Beyoncé, being “Drunk in Love” means strolling on a beach at night in a bikini while carrying a trophy in a sheer-wrapped bikini at night with a trophy while her man raps about having her “breasteses in my breakfast” – or at least that’s director Hype Williams’ intepretation in a video for the song, both of which come from Beyoncé, the surprise new album the singer released last week.
Over the course of the clip’s six minutes, she dances against a backdrop of smoke and selectively mouths the song’s lyrics, sometimes staring at the camera as Jay Z raps with his eyes closed. The track is a bubbly, sexy, snap-filled duet with her husband that Rolling Stone’s Jon Dolan named the album’s “Best Song” and the magazine’s Rob Sheffield described as “superb.” The video, as metaphorical as it is, perfectly captures the feeling of the track.
The Ultimate Guide to Beyoncé’s Surprise New Album
The 14-song, 17-video album has sold more than 617,000 copies since it came out at midnight Friday, and will debut at Number One on the Billboard 200 albums chart. That’s a personal best for Beyoncé, beating the 541,000 copies of B’day she sold the first week that album came out in 2006. On the night Beyoncé came out, the singer performed “XO,” one of the album’s songs, for the first time at her concert in Chicago.
Former EMI executive Syd Schwartz, who now runs the indie marketing firm Linchpin Digital, recently told Rolling Stone that putting an album out as quickly as Beyoncé was quite a feat. “Many other artists who aren’t of Beyoncé’s stature would not have been able to get this done and move it through the system this quickly,” he said. “She obviously had to bypass a lot of the standard mechanisms to make this work.”