(Golden Angel/Interscope)
With a sleek dancefloor-facing sound, the Ghanaian American singer is deliriously in thrall to wealth and celebrity – but most of all love
Fountain Baby, the second album by Amaarae, was a revelation – a sensual, funny, frank and musically dense record released in 2023 that established the 31-year-old Ghanaian American pop musician as a cultural force to match contemporaries such as Rosalía and Charli xcx. Although the songs are hedonistic – largely oscillating between wry flexes of wealth and lyrics about trifling with, and being trifled by, women in her orbit – she is also a realist: actions have consequences in Amaarae’s world, such as on Reckless & Sweet, as she wonders whether her lovers desire her or merely her money.
Despite the ingenuity and complexity of her music, Amaarae has struggled to break into the mainstream, in the UK at least. A recent Glastonbury set felt sparsely attended and, aside from 2020’s Sad Girlz Luv Money, one of the most enduring viral hits to emerge from TikTok into the real world, few of her singles have had crossover moments.
Hopefully that will change with Black Star, her sleek and hugely enjoyable third album. It requires a slight resetting of expectations. After the plainly radical Fountain Baby, perhaps Amaarae would become downright experimental, but Black Star makes it clear that she just wants to have fun. This is her take on a club record, weaving elements of house, trance and EDM into Afrobeats rhythms and spiky rap cadences. It’s more straightforward than its predecessor, but that doesn’t diminish its pleasure, derived in large part from Amaarae’s relentless pursuit of just that: these songs exalt drinking, drug‑taking, rowdy sex and fine dressing in such a clarified, unapologetic way that they would elicit blushes even from the Weeknd, pop’s reigning king of smut.
