'Beyoncé' One Year Later: The Album's 5 Best Songs

Today, Dec. 13, marks the one-year anniversary of Beyoncé's self-titled album, which was released on iTunes in the middle of the night without any warning or promotion whatsoever. Aside from revolutionizing the way in which mainstream artists choose to release their music, Beyoncé is musically a remarkable album as well, a refreshingly progressive and cerebral blend of trap, R&B, and electronica. To celebrate the anniversary of this incredible album, here's a ranking of its five best songs.

5. Haunted

Beyoncé opens up with the relatively straightforward and conventional "Pretty Hurts," but once it moves on to the second track "Haunted," you begin to realize that this won't be your standard Beyoncé album. This is the sort of abstract electronic R&B that you hear from more underground artists such as The Weeknd or How To Dress Well, but rarely do artists as influential as Beyoncé dare to get this experimental and hookless. The final section of this song in particular wouldn't have sounded out of place on Thom Yorke's latest solo album.

4. Heaven

After an hour of trap beats and synthesizers, Beyoncé comes down in its penultimate track "Heaven" with little more than piano and some minimal percussion, giving us what is by far the most gorgeous and original ballad by a mainstream pop artist in the last 10 years. Though the incredible production of the album's other tracks makes it easy to lose sight of Beyoncé's remarkable talents as a vocalist, "Heaven" allows her to lay her voice right out in the open.

3. ***Flawless

The A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin once described the core message of Beyoncé's music as being, "F--k you, I'm awesome," and nowhere on this album (or in Beyoncé's entire career, for that matter) is this message clearer than "***Flawless." With its sample of a speech by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, this is the song that announced Beyoncé as a feminist, and finally brought feminism to the mainstream in 2014, making this perhaps the most socially impactful and significant pop song of this decade.

2. Partition

Beyoncé may be a slickly produced pop album, but that doesn't mean it isn't absolutely filthy as well. On an album full of songs about sex, "Partition" is the crown jewel, an ode to intimate moments in the back seat of a limo on the way to the club. Though many other tracks on the album take the abstract route in their production, "Partition" is an unequivocal banger (pun somewhat intended), a song that could absolutely be spun in a club.

1. Drunk in Love

"Drunk in Love" is so much more than "surfbort." When that Arabic vocal melody comes in to open up the song, it's like we've stepped into some sort of dream, where everything seems to make sense when you're in the middle of it all, but not so much when you look back on it. The song is unlike anything else in modern pop music; an ethereal, stream-of-consciousness love song about the joys of marriage (performed by an actual married couple) that somehow refrains from saccharine sentimentality.

Tags

Beyonce, Beyonce Knowles, Jay-Z, Thom Yorke, Radiohead, The Weeknd