Amaarae doesn’t walk into a room; she rewires the circuitry. Two years after Fountain Baby turned heads and charts inside out, the Ghanaian-American polymath returns with ‘Black Star,’ a 13-track, 44-minute pop hallucination that feels less like a follow-up and more like a coronation.
Where Fountain Baby simmered with poised introspection, Black Star throws the windows open and lets the breeze riot. Joy is the engine here—playful, mischievous, and utterly contagious. Amaarae calls it “a genesis of me feeling sure and confident,” and you hear that certainty in every glitching synth and highlife guitar lick.
The sound is borderless by design. Working alongside longtime co-pilot Kyu Steed, she decamped to Brazil to marinate in baile funk studios, then folded those rhythms into a lattice of Afrobeats, hyperpop, and gleaming electronic filigree. The result is a kaleidoscope that never feels like pastiche; it’s Amaarae’s accent on every dialect.
The guest list is a fever dream: PinkPantheress skittering across pixelated hooks, Bree Runway spitting barbed-wire bars, R&B deity Charlie Wilson lending velvet gravitas. Then—because why settle?—Naomi Campbell materialises, her spoken interlude a runway strut through the speakers. Fashion and phonk collide; the album winks and keeps moving.
Lead single “S.M.O.” is the mission statement: highlife horns looped into orbit, Amaarae’s feather-light vocals surfing a tide of futuristic gloss. It’s heritage remixed in real time, a reminder that roots can propel you forward as easily as they anchor you.
Her voice remains the stealth weapon—soft enough to slip past defenses, commanding enough to reroute the beat. Layers reward headphones: a buried ad-lib here, a sudden funk clave there. Black Star is an album that keeps redrawing its own map.
Between worlds all her life—Accra and Atlanta, tradition and tomorrow—Amaarae has finally built a planet of her own. Black Star isn’t just ambitious; it’s arrival. Global pop just got its new North Star.
Listen to the album here>> https://amaarae.lnk.to/blackstar