Album Review: Black Star by Amaarae
Amaarae extends a line from the opulent sensuality of Fountain Baby through the reflective EP toward a playful, dance‑floor‑oriented celebration of heritage and desire on her third studio album.
With Fountain Baby, Amaarae crafted the record from a self-curated blend of pop and romance. She wrote and arranged everything herself after feeling she had to prove she could carry songs without the help of guests. To create it, she immersed herself in pop’s technical vocabulary, studying songs by Madonna and Janet Jackson, Nelly’s call‑and‑response hooks, and even the Clipse’s production choices. That research produced an opulent mix of strings, harp, and hip‑hop bravado, and it became a character study about desire and material aspiration that draws on her Atlanta‑Accra upbringing. A year later, she appended the album with roses are red, tears are blue — A Fountain Baby Extended Play, adding seven new songs that took a softer tone. The EP blended alté, highlife, R&B, and house; “wanted” built a gentle groove around a slinky sample and harmonies, “jehovah witness” let her rap in double‑time and squeal with delight, while “diamonds” and “sweeeet” set heartbreak and longing against humid dance beats. A ballad called “THUG (Truly Humble Under God)” stripped her sound back to piano and strings; she murmurs, “I don’t fold under pressure/I don’t fall under pain” before the song swells into catharsis. Together, these releases fleshed out her persona: fluid melodies, playful flexing, and sex‑positive lyricism that treat confidence as its love language.
Her third record, Black Star, pivots that freedom toward joy. Named for the black star on Ghana’s flag and her sense of self, it’s described as a genesis of me feeling sure and confident, drawing from Ghanaian highlife, Brazilian baile funk, and other Black dance traditions. She made the project with longtime collaborator Kyu Steed and traveled to Brazil to work with baile‑funk producers, insisting on having fun after the seriousness of Fountain Baby. The lead single “S.M.O.” (“Slut Me Out”) fuses 1980s highlife influences with Detroit club bass, a drum roll reminiscent of Magic System’s “1er Gaou” and Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You,” and a zouk‑like melody that she likens to a steel pan imitating an evil synth. A video shot in Ghana celebrates the strength and beauty of Black bodies, and at Coachella, she previewed the era by playing Ghanaian songs, shaving her head on stage, and hosting a block party in Accra. A second single, “Girlie‑Pop!,” began as a freestyle over guitar on a night in Brazil; she says it aims to bottle “the feeling of a kiss from your favourite person,” and wants it to soundtrack daydreams about your crush.
Amaarae doesn’t need to shout to be heard. The Ghanaian-American singer deploys a breathy whisper as a show of strength, not a coy seduction, a soft command that asserts her agency with every song. This is a record of glitz and grit, intimacy and excess, where a hushed voice draws you in even as the music behind it explodes across genres. Black Star lives up to its name’s layered significance that preaches and practices liberation through excess. Between songs recorded throughout Miami, Accra, Los Angeles, and São Paulo, Amaarae blends airy club beats, highlife rhythms, amapiano log drums, and hyperpop glitches into a transcontinental soundscape that pulses with an exhilarating sense that disparate sounds and influences are colliding in real time. It’s messy, futuristic, and quietly uncompromising in its vision. “Stuck Up” bubbles in on neon synths and a looping beat that circles back on itself insistently. Amaarae’s lyrics are clipped and suggestive, fragments of a late-night scene that blur like smeared makeup at 3 AM. There’s a heady nostalgia here; the track plays like a cinematic flashback to club nights that might or might not have happened. Her voice is almost lost in the mix, a gauzy whisper cutting through the bass throb, and yet she’s utterly in control of the mood.
Co-produced with London’s Bree Runway and the mysterious Starkillers, “Starkilla” lurches forward with hyper-glossy synths and am insane house bassline. Auto-tune coats Amaarae’s voice until it gleams like smeared lip gloss on glass, an artificial sheen that somehow heightens the song’s raw attitude. The hook is brazenly hedonistic and straightforward: “ketamine, coke, and molly” chanted over and over. It’s a shock tactic and a mission statement, daring to either take it or leave it. Bree Runway’s guest verse and ad-libs only amplify the badass energy, each sly line sharpening the track’s edge. The clash of Amaarae’s light vocal with the track’s dark, pounding core shouldn’t work on paper, but in her world, the clash is the point. Even at her most lovestruck, Amaarae keeps the listener on their toes. Mid-album cuts “B2B” and “She Is My Drug” delve into the haze of infatuation and devotion, but each with a twist. “B2B” repurposes the term as a sultry metaphor. It’s a “crush-object” anthem built on pulsating electro drums and the rolling thrust of South African amapiano, and “She Is My Drug,” Amaarae extends the metaphor of intoxicating love even further. The song oozes with sensuality, dripping like honey. Over a delicate, lacy arrangement, her vocals are especially intimate, almost in your ear. She speaks of submission and promise, portraying love as a substance she’s willing to overdose on.
Of course, in Amaarae’s universe, even tenderness comes wrapped in provocation. “ms60” rides an amapiano-tinged groove straight from South Africa’s townships, all quaking log drums and syrupy bass bounce. It’s the album’s most straightforward dancefloor cut—you can practically feel the strobe lights and the heat of bodies moving in sync. Yet even here, she seeds a bit of drama. Supermodel Naomi Campbell makes an unexpected cameo, delivering a spoken monologue in her smoky London accent. “They call me a bitch, a villain, controversial diva—no, I am the Black Star,” Naomi purrs defiantly. In the context of Black Star’s excess, “Kiss Me Thru the Phone pt.2” is a moment of vulnerable clarity, like finding a quiet corner in a chaotic club to spill your feelings. The title winks at Soulja Boy’s bubbly 2008 ringtone hit, but Amaarae flips the concept on its head. This sequel is a glitchy, wistful daydream of digital love. Over a lo-fi, hyperpop-inflected production, Amaarae and PinkPantheress trade hushed vocals that twirl around each other like Alvin and the Chipmunks (literally).
In smoothing out its edges, it loses some of the quirky charm that defines the album. Still, Black Star doesn’t linger on perfectionism; a song that falters will simply glitch, mutate, or repeat itself into something else. “Dream Scenario,” a collaboration featuring R&B legend Charlie Wilson, could have been a triumphant meeting of generations, but it ends up trying a little too hard to sparkle. However, “100DRUM” comes barreling in after those polished moments like a beautiful wreck. It’s a dizzying whirl of distorted percussion (perhaps the titular hundred drums all at once) and drowned-out vocals. It’s a fleeting lifeline of sweetness in an otherwise cacophonous track, the kind of curveball that reminds you Amaarae relishes chaos as part of her artistry. Over what starts as an almost spiritual jazz swell (one can make out faint saxophones, maybe even strings, in the mix), Amaarae builds an anthem for a new generation with “Free the Youth.” It may sound like your typical closing track for the album because it launches it skyward on a note of hopeful defiance. In Ghana, “Free The Youth” is also the name of a youth-driven streetwear collective and cultural movement—a fitting reference for an artist bridging youth culture at home with global trends.
The album is the sound of an artist reborn and refusing limits: not the old Amaarae, not a tidy avatar of “Afrobeats singer” or “pop star,” but something freer, more challenging to define, a Black star exploding into a nebula of new possibilities. One moment you hear Ghana’s azonto rhythm sneaking into a track’s undercurrent; the next you catch a whip of Chicago house hi-hats or a Brazilian funk carioca breakbeat. Rather than dilute her heritage, this bold fusion amplifies it. Amaarae is effectively saying: This is what being Ghanaian can sound like in 2025—not a single genre or trope, but an open-ended conversation between cultures. In Black Star, those many ways include everything from a log drum pattern rattling your ribcage to a trap hi-hat skitter that makes your head spin. The album doesn’t pick sides or cater to borders, but moves like the diaspora itself—fluid, adaptive, proudly hybrid. By interweaving her West African roots with global pop futurism, Amaarae joins a vanguard of Black diasporic artists redefining the mainstream. One could draw parallels to genre-bending peers like Rosalía or Charli XCX (whom she’s been compared to), or to fellow Africans like Burna Boy and Tems who’ve carried their local sounds onto international stages. But in truth, Amaarae’s vision feels singular. There’s a touch of the avant-garde edge of a Grace Jones, that fearless blend of high fashion, sexual provocation, and pan-global sound, yet Amaarae’s approach is firmly rooted in the internet age’s cross-pollination, where a song can be a nexus of many worlds at once.
As a whole, Black Star is as contradictory as it is cohesive, a celebration of excess that’s also intricately intentional. Does it truly preach “liberation through excess,” as its manifesto claims? In many ways, yes. Amaarae indulges every facet of her artistry to the extreme: whispering when others would belt, layering rhythms until they threaten to combust, pushing lyrical taboos (drugs, sex, wealth) to flaunt her freedom. This excess is not aimless hedonism but a reclamation. It’s Amaarae saying that a young African woman can be as brazen, as genreless, and as extravagant as she pleases, and still craft art of substance and meaning. Even the album’s flaws reinforce its message that liberation is a process, not a polished destination. Amaarae is not interested in neat endings or clean morality. She’s reveling in the in-between spaces, the contradictions one must embrace to be truly free. For her, this album marks a triumphant homecoming and a launchpad to the world stage all at once
In the two years since her breakthrough Fountain Baby, she has evolved from a cult alté-pop figure into a global force, opening for stars as disparate as Childish Gambino and Sabrina Carpenter, making history at Coachella, and now, with Black Star, staking her claim as a bold new architect of pop’s future. “Black Star to me is the genesis of me feeling sure and confident in myself as a grown woman,” Amaarae told Rolling Stone, explaining how personal this creative leap has been. She added, “My soul can’t rest until I feel like I’ve made a project that resonates in a really huge way globally.” With this album, she may well achieve that global resonance on her uncompromising terms. Amaarae carries her Ghanaian heritage not as a static badge, but as a living, shape-shifting force that she’s unafraid to throw into the mix with everything else she loves. Liberation through excess? Black Star makes a compelling case that sometimes, to find yourself, you have to risk getting a little lost in the lights. And as Amaarae’s refrains echo amid the log drums and laser synths, one thing becomes clear: this Black star was always meant to shine far beyond the confines of any one galaxy, and she’s only just beginning her supernova.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “B2B,” “Fineshyt,” “100DRUM”