It's been becoming more of a trend that a sure-to-be-huge movie comes not just with a soundtrack, but also with a companion album put together by one strong-minded artist and a lot of their talented friends. We saw it with Kendrick Lamar's great Black Panther album, and now we're seeing it again with Beyonce's The Lion King: The Gift (which also features Kendrick Lamar on a song). In addition to voicing Nala in the new Lion King remake and singing the Lion King classic "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" for the movie and its soundtrack, Beyonce produced this new album that's inspired by the Lion King but also entirely works as an album of its own. Like Kendrick did on Black Panther, she appears on a lot of the songs and you can clearly hear her fingerprints all over everything, but she also lets other artists take the spotlight and it works to great effect.
The first single released from the album was closing track "Spirit," which is also on the film's soundtrack, and it's not surprising that that's the single they chose to go along with a "family-friendly" film. It's an inspiring, uplifting Beyonce ballad, the kind that’s as inoffensive and "family-friendly" as the movie itself. It's not a bad song, but it's a red herring for The Gift, which is mostly cut from a similar cloth as Beyonce's recent, boundary-pushing works Lemonade and Everything Is Love. Beyonce-led songs like "Bigger," "Find Your Way Back" and "Otherwise" sound as instantly great as anything Beyonce has released in the past few years, and should easily appeal to fans of her less radio-friendly work. But The Gift is also more than just another Beyonce album. It relates more directly to The Lion King than the Black Panther album did to Black Panther thanks to Lion King-inspired interludes in between each song (that feature voice actors from the film). It also embraces Afropop/Afrobeat as much as it embraces Western hip hop and R&B, and it pulls off a blend of those sounds expertly. Modern African music has deservedly been getting more and more love in the Western pop world lately (thanks in part to Drake incorporating it, and the international rise of artists like Burna Boy and Mr. Eazi), and it seems very likely that The Gift will only help this trend continue. Both Burna Boy and Mr. Eazi are on this album, along with other current African pop musicians like Tekno, Yemi Alade, Salatiel, Wizkid, Tiwa Savage, Shatta Wale, and Moonchild Sanelly, and those artists' styles blend wonderfully with Beyonce and her American guests like Kendrick Lamar, Jay-Z, Childish Gambino, Pharrell, Tierra Whack, 070 Shake, and Jessie Reyez.