Zoe Liu, Clare:

Michelangelo. Rembrandt. Raphael. Like such greats before her, Beyoncé needs no more than her first name to be identified. iOS will even autocorrect that acute accent because how dare you disrespect Queen B? Working non-stop from the age of 15, her career as singer-songwriter-actress has taken her from the nineties to the teenies. Bey’s creative skill has ensured her re-emergence and reinvention from one of three in Destiny’s Child to a solo artist in her own right. 

And she truly is an artist. Sure, on one level her visual album is just a marketing ploy – its surprise unveiling has triggered real excitement, refreshing next to the usual media bombardment. But more than that, she has created an entire aesthetic.

Discussing her latest release on YouTube, she turns to look straight into the camera: "I just want this to come out when it’s ready. And from me, to my fans." Her approach restores personal involvement to both the musician and the listener. Beyoncé shows us the visual process of her artistry. She offers us a glimpse into her mind. It’s innovative and it’s intimate. In her words, her album is a complete "experience".

More than singer-songwriter-actress, Beyoncé is wife, mother and artist. She can connect with us. And that’s why we love her.

Alicia Tan, Magdalene:

Beyoncé is undoubtedly a sexy and even sexual album. But it is one written and performed from a woman’s perspective. Songs like 'Drunk in Love' and 'Blow' exist as a beautiful celebration of female sexuality – a desire to engage in it, enjoy it, rather than merely experience it.

Indeed Beyoncé is delivering a giant middle finger to all the slut-shamers – she is unashamed of her sexuality, and is still capable of having a strong monogamous relationship, raising a daughter, and having a successful career. In the speech sampled in '***Flawless', Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche speaks about how girls are taught not to have ambition in the same way as boys, and that they cannot be sexual beings in the way boys are. Beyoncé is fighting so hard against these patriarchal stereotypes and glass ceilings.

To all the critics who do take the microscopic view, Beyoncé delivers her message of not caring. In ‘***Flawless’, she mocks the idea that anyone can simply wake up looking and being flawless. In doing so, she mocks all her critics who demand that same level of perfection from her. She knows she is flawed, but her flaws do not define her. Neither do careless lyrics from her songs of years past. In ‘Pretty Hurts’, she sings: "perfection is a disease of a nation." By rejecting the notion of perfection, Beyoncé is opening up the doors of feminism to everyone. Everyone makes mistakes, but none of that disqualifies you from being a feminist. Beyoncé is helping make that crystal clear.

Sarah Lusack, Trinity:

Beyoncé’s new, self-titled album was a surprise in more ways than one. Apart from the unconventional release which became one of the biggest music and social media moments of the year, the album itself also reflects a different side to Beyoncé. Unlike her earlier albums, Beyoncé has a stronger and darker sound featuring fewer dance anthems, though there are still elements of old in ‘XO’ and ‘Blue’.

The album is also braver, addressing both private matters and social issues Beyoncé previously shieded away from. The intimacies of her private life have largely been under wraps though tracks such as ‘Drunk in Love’, likely to be one of the album’s major successes, and the retro-sounding, ‘Blow’ directly addresses her relationship with Jay Z and, more specifically, how much she enjoys having her "cherry turned out". ‘Pretty Hurts’ and ‘***Flawless’  have led some to question whether Beyoncé should be interpreted as a statement of the star’s feminist beliefs. As a whole, I don’t think this was the motivation behind the album, or even these ‘feminist’ songs in particular; rather, Beyoncé is giving her own take on current issues in the way she knows best. 

Beyoncé is the artist’s most mature piece to date, and her fullest expression of who she is as a woman, wife, mother and icon. 

Josh Bradlow, Magdalene:

With her last album 4 failing to produce any big hits despite being crammed full of deliriously-in-love bangers, Beyoncé marks a frank and uncompromising departure for Queen B.  This is a brilliantly strange album. There’s no other way I can put it really. Whilst some pop thrills remain – with the hypnotic ‘Flawless’ and the bass onslaught of ‘Drunk in Love’ providing particular highlights – this album stands out for its bewildering soundscapes and surprisingly honest lyrical content. At one point in 'Mine', when Beyoncé admits that she’s "been having conversations about breakups and separations/I’m not feeling like myself since the baby", she gives us more of an insight into her personality than the 500+ key changes of ‘Love on Top’ ever could.

For me, it’s exciting to hear Beyoncé pushing herself to make challenging and progressive music, and whilst this is achieved at the expense of many genuinely memorable choruses, I’ve got a feeling that she has enough of those in her collection anyway. Beyoncé is the work of an artist completely in control of the creative process, and long may it remain that way. Long live Queen B.

Salome Wagaine, former editor of Varsity:

I have a rather complicated relationship with Beyoncé. I don’t like how liberally she can, er, "acquire" ideas from other artists and the Beyhive is off-putting to say the least. But I’m more wary of the amount and type of criticism she faces compared to her peers: take the amount of flak Beyoncé received from broadsheets and big feminist websites over the name of the Mrs Carter Tour versus the relative silence over Gaga’s collaboration with R Kelly, a phenomenon #beyoncethinkpieces highlighted in standard Black Twitter style.
 
This album, however, was refreshingly honest. ‘Blue’ is testament to Beyoncé holding motherhood precious without becoming too sentimental, while elsewhere the difficulties in the Carter-Knowles marriage are frankly addressed. And yeah, it’s sexual: I pretty much gasped at the Monica Lewinsky line, amongst others, in ‘Partition’ but as a whole it’s more tantalisingly sexy than downright rude.
 
Beyoncé is by no means perfect, in large part down to Jay Z and the crude sampling of the disastrous Challenger take-off in the otherwise charming single ‘XO’ (the ‘love like every day is your last’ sentiment is apparent from the lyrics so using real-life deaths to illustrate the point is both redundant and tasteless). However, the production on the second half of ‘Haunted’ alone makes it clear the eponymous effort is more than just a great marketing case study. 

Read 'Beyoncé's no feminist icon. That's fine' here