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.
You can imagine Amaarae’s bass-heavy but elegant music soundtracking a dark, exclusive superclub, a fitting mode for a musician who prioritises opulence and indulgence in her music. Starkilla, a collaboration with the London rapper Bree Runway, is a villainous-sounding house track the hook of which is simply “ketamine, coke and molly” over and over again; the slick crush-object song B2B combines pulsating electro with the euphoric chug of South African amapiano. There is a remarkable amount of other dance styles explored here: high-speed dembow and baile funk animate Girlie-Pop!; there are elements of Detroit techno and gqom, another South African style, on SMO; and the opener, Stuck Up, features raucous club rap. Even if it’s a more traditional record overall, her globalist attitude makes for sparky, cosmopolitan music.
The focus of Amaarae’s lyrics hasn’t changed significantly, although Black Star is a softer and more lovestruck album than its predecessor. On Kiss Me Thru the Phone Pt 2, a PinkPantheress-featuring sequel to the Soulja Boy original, Amaarae and PinkPantheress sing sweetly about “yearning for you to the bone”, their twinned helium voices sounding surprisingly great together. Fineshyt, the best song here, is a gentle trance track that captures the innate sense of melancholy in the much-maligned genre, Amaarae singing about wanting to try a real relationship with her object of affection. These songs provide a welcome counterpoint to the abrasive posturing of earlier ones, which have Amaarae and guests – including Naomi Campbell – mugging and boasting to admittedly great effect.
Campbell’s appearance is eyebrow-raising: “They call me a bitch, a villain, controversial diva – no, I am the black star,” she intones, which will probably inflame the many people still up in arms over Campbell’s misdeeds, ranging from assault convictions to the alleged mismanagement of a charity (which she denies). But it’s fitting for an album that is deliriously in love with wealth, celebrity and all the power it affords. There is a difference between Amaarae and all the other stars fixated on such topics: for her, glamour is a side quest and love is the motive. Shopping at Saks and being passed another blunt might be nice, Amaarae seems to say, but the real high comes from finding someone to share it with.
This week Shaad listened to
Wild Pink and Fenne Lily: Disintegrate – Edit
Wild Pink’s John Ross is one of the best lyricists in indie music. The deluxe reissue of his fantastic Dulling the Horns promises plenty of great reinterpretations of his bizarro images, including this soft take on Disintegrate by the English folk singer Fenne Lily.
