News September 19, 2017

A Canadian punk band accidentally ended up on Beyoncé’s record

Just imagine the feeling of lining up outside your favourite local record store to grab the newest vinyl edition of Beyonce’s 2016 record Lemonade. You grab your record, run home, pop the record on your player, but instead of hearing the album’s opener, ‘Pray You Catch Me’, you’re instead met with Canadian punk band Zex and a track called ‘No Sanctuary’. That has become the reality for countless loyal Beyoncé fans today, thanks to a factory mispress.

As Pitchfork reports, Beyoncé’s Lemonade finally saw its official vinyl release this month, with the record being released as part of a box set entitled How To Make Lemonade, and as a standalone lemon yellow vinyl pressing.

However Canada’s Zex took to Facebook today to share with their fans a rather interesting oddity in regards to the new vinyl pressing, namely that the A-side of the record actually consists of the first half of their 2017 record, Uphill Battle, instead.

https://www.facebook.com/zexzexzexofficial/videos/838006423041806/

Pitchfork notes that a representative for Columbia Records released a statement today, confirming the mispress. “Due to human error at the Celebrate Records plant in Germany, which Sony uses to manufacture vinyl, a small amount of the European run of the Beyoncé Lemonade vinyl included music from Canadian punk band, ZEX, on Side A,” the statement begins.

“Beyoncé and ZEX were not aware of or responsible for the mispress. Fans who purchased the vinyl will be refunded and given a replacement copy. We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.”

Zex also spoke to Slate about the mix-up as well, stating that they weren’t aware of the mix-up at first. “We first found out through a friend who works at Rough Trade East in London,” they said. “One copy was returned because of [the mix-up], and they found out it was Zex because they seemingly used something like Shazam which determines what an artist is. And then my friend alerted me, and then within hours there was tons of very confused Beyoncé fans writing to us who had also done the same thing.”

Zex also noted that lots of fans have been trying to sell the band these rare records at exorbitant prices. “A large number of them seem to be in Australia for some reason,” the band said. Who knows, maybe your local has a whole bunch of these on hand?

Of course, this isn’t the first time this has happened, with Gordi’s debut record Reservoir seeing a similar occurrence last month, featuring the second half of Queens Of The Stone Age’s Villains as the record’s B-side.

Gordi was a pretty good sport about the whole deal, stating “Obviously I was aware that the Queens of the Stone Age album was coming out the same week as mine and I was aware it would probably garner all the limelight, so the logical solution was to just chuck a bunch of their songs on Reservoir.”

“I anticipate either people won’t notice or they’ll appreciate the dynamic shift.”

If you managed to get your hands on one of these mispressed copies of Lemonade, prepare for it to be a huge collector’s item. As it stands, copies of Beyoncé’s How To Make Lemonade box set are already appearing on music website Discogs, being listed for £1,000.

Check out Beyoncé’s ‘Hold Up’, below.