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Clad mostly in the radiant silver their queen requested they slip on in honor of Virgo season, a hive of Beyoncé fans swarmed Lumen Field last night for the 51st show in support of 2022’s Renaissance, an album of that summer engendering a tour of this summer whose closest current peer is the one embarked on by Taylor Swift.

Renaissance, an inexhaustibly enjoyable epic informed by dance-music history and the queer nightlife inextricable from it, is Beyoncé’s best album, though at the thrilling two-and-a-half-hour-long show promoting it, it was positioned more like a climax than a grand introduction. Before arriving at the first song from the album, Beyoncé dug into, for about a half-hour, a series of ballads from her past, “Dangerously in Love 2” and “1+1” among them. Heightened by a shimmering Elie Saab dress whose design, ornamented with a hood and feathery cape, recalled a waterfall, the grandeur projected was practically messianic.

Read the full review on 425.