Get ready to go country, Bey Hive! Beyoncé gave her fans a special treat on Sunday, dropping two new country songs, subsequent “visualizer” videos, and announcing an upcoming album during the Super Bowl LVIIl.
Texas Hold ’Em is made for do-si-doing on a dusty dancefloor, with banjo, line-dancing commands, and exclamations of “woo hoo!” that might as well be “yee haw!” There’s a whisper of another recent pop-hoedown, Jonas Brothers’ What a Man Gotta Do, to the firmly resolved melody, but also something much more rootsy and authentically country to the arrangement, with its closely harmonised backing vocals and admirably restrained feel.
Watch the video below.
The track 16 Carriages, meanwhile, begins with an earthy thwack like a gloved hand on a horse’s flank, and there’s the unmistakably poignant drone of pedal steel. But the song quickly becomes Halo-proportioned, as Beyoncé looks back on the graft of her career since her mid-teens. Those 16 carriages are perhaps the caravan of tour buses and lorries heading out for the Renaissance tour, with Beyoncé “overworked and overwhelmed” but with “art to make / I got love to create on this holy night”.
Watch the video below.