When Sabrina Carpenter set out on tour behind her massive 2024 breakout Short n' Sweet, she was supported on the first leg by the Ghanaian-American pop auteur Amaarae. For anyone vaguely familiar with both artists, it was a strange pairing on the surface — even Amaarae herself didn't quite get it at first. "I was like, 'What the hell do Sabrina Carpenter know about some motherf***ing Amaarae?' " the singer told Rolling Stone in June. But the connection isn't too difficult to trace for anyone who has intently navigated the romantic misadventures of both catalogs: "She's a freak just like me," Amaarae eventually explained, "it's just a different kind of expression."
Amaarae sees confidence as the overlap. Her music is tenebrous and innovative where Carpenter's is ebullient and trenchant, and she sings of doting on baddies while Carpenter scoffs at dopey men. Yet both artists are defined by an unrestricted sexuality and an audacious charisma derived from self-assurance. There's yet another similarity: Amaarae, like Carpenter, is a star just waiting in plain sight to be discovered by mainstream audiences, and it's hard not to envision some kind of overnight revelation for her. Since 2020, she has made a case for being the most dynamic avant-pop artist the world over.
BLACK STAR makes it clear that she is tired of waiting for everyone else to catch up. She appears on the cover as the literal star on the Ghanaian flag, adorned in a shiny, black body suit, embodying several things all at once. To wit: not only does the album nod to her national pride, but it marks her as the Black star, one in touch with many different modes of pop expression in various spaces. Within the iconography of the flag, the star stands for anti-colonialism. Indeed, intentional or not, Amaarae performs her own form of countercolonial activation by uniting the dance music of a disconnected community. She presents herself as the people's pop princess, there and here too, a folk star in the streets if not on the charts. "I dropped an album, went Blackinum / Your artist was budding, I sacked them / I'm a big dealer in real life / You just a deal on the track," she barks on opener "Stuck Up." There is an emphasis on "real life" in the music itself — not simply that the music really reaching people is often distinct from the more ordinary stuff, but the belief that her artistry is tethering those listeners under its thrall to something larger than themselves; in this case, an interlinked, if disjointed, dance subculture.
This hasn't always been the Amaarae mandate. Her 2020 debut, The Angel You Don't Know, primarily pursued a luminous, left-field sound all her own, free of any labels and embraced largely as an outlier in Nigeria's alté movement. And with Fountain Baby, from 2023, she sought to remove Afro as the pretext for her pop entirely. Both albums are chameleonic masterclasses demonstrating a specialist at various stages in her evolution, the sociopathic dance queen presiding over her fantasy worlds — the former a cherubic trap wonderland, the latter an erotic Shangri-La, each airbrushed with light, aeriform vocals. You could think of the bookend refrain on The Angel You Don't Know's "Trust Fund Baby" as instructive to her operation, both lyrically and sonically. "Drown in sunlight / Angels sounding off against the tide," she sings, her lithe, layered harmonies even more dewy and ethereal than usual. "I'll take my time / Soak in all the feels and all the vibes."
Soaking in all the feels and the vibes is the animating principle of BLACK STAR. In its songs, she draws her confidence not just from her pronounced, undeniable brilliance, but from an increased celebrity profile. She lingers in all the commotion that comes with being a trend-breaker and socialite, adding names to her dance card and drugs to her system. There aren't a lot of moments when she isn't on something. Her soda is "Spike Lee'd." She kisses codeine. Hell, there are quaaludes like it's Wolf of Wall Street. "Ketamine, coke, and molly" is the hook of "Starkilla." But it's less about doing drugs than what being on them allows: reduced inhibitions, heightened sensations, time-dilated perception, a reciprocated sense of influence, a chance encounter so wildly fortuitous it begins to feel like destiny. "Do you believe in love off the drugs?" she asks on "She Is My Drug," as the disorienting lines of intimacy and inebriation begin to blur. "There's times when I'm Perc'n and wavy and need to let go," she coos on "B2B." "There's ways we can turn and persuade it, I'm giving you some." Enticement is the name of the game, a brain-addled sweet-talk, and as temptation begins to feel like romance, Amaarae poses another question: "Are you my virtue or my vice?"
Much of the album feels like it is avoiding an answer, choosing to plunge deeper and deeper into a sensual reverie. "I wanna meet the god that made you," she chirps on "S.M.O.," so smitten that she plays trick on "Fineshyt." If "Dream Scenario" is the euphoria of the ultimate high (being coked up, rich and in love, blacking out at the dealership and buying a Barbie dream house), "100DRUM" is the crash. As her verses stagger into a baile funk rhythm, she sings of haters and paranoia. When suddenly, the beat erupts into Jersey club, she ups the aggression, taking on all comers. "Disillusioned, nowhere lucid, what a bother, what a nuisance," she murmurs. But even that disruption to her nonstop party seems to bring out a different kind of cavorting catharsis, the romp as cleanse, a sweat-soaked body in motion burning off pent-up emotions like fuel.
In addition to highlife, hip-hop, Afrobeats and Jersey club, BLACK STAR channels house and Eurodance (which traces its origins back to Chicago house, and was defined by Black women like Culture Beat's Tania Evans and Snap!'s Thea Austin, as well as diasporic acts like Haddaway and La Bouche, and even Black Box's hired avatar Katrin Quinol, who mimed Loleatta Holloway for her Italian compatriots on 1989's "Ride on Time"). Amaarae enlists two British Africans of different vocations — rapper Bree Runway (Ghana) and dance revivalist Pinkpantheress (Kenya) — as she summons early-2000s raunch anthems (Kelis' "Milkshake," Sisqo's "Thong Song") like her ancestral plane is that era's go-to celebrity club 1 Oak. There's Gap Band interlude, courtesy of Charlie Wilson, a citation for Cher's paradigm-shifting "Believe," and she lets supermodel emeritus Naomi Campbell catwalk through her discotheque on "ms60" before delivering a statement of purpose for the album: "They call me a b***, a villain — controversial diva. No. I am … the Black Star."
The Black Star, as a figure, comes across as an assertive, unshackled Black woman, "controversial" primarily because she is so free. It is fitting that Amaarae has never sounded more out front in her songs than she does here. There were moments on Fountain Baby where it felt as if she was whispering, or ducking behind production for cover. She has spoken of her singing voice as a means to tap into vulnerability, but what she is expressing is bold, and she seems more comfortable doing so than before. That feeds directly into the album's general thesis: the dancefloor is a place to get loose, and the bedroom even more so. "I unleash, you attach," she sings on "B2B."
The club as sanctuary isn't particularly novel, but there is something fresh about Amaarae's most blatantly referential album also being the one on which she exhibits her most intercontinental vision — one of a liberated (which is to also say, decolonial) Black dance music. She has always made dance music but more as a fusionist fever dream, a singularity sucking all things into an Amaarae vortex. She is still the star here, in both the cultural and orbital sense, but the focus is on the components, which specifically represent the historical, cultural and geographic directions they point you in.
At the end of BLACK STAR, on "FREE THE YOUTH," Amaarae slips in a simple but telling little maxim: "Day by day I used to pray for nights," she sings, rolling out the days so they seem endless. It scans like an invocation, her hailing dusk — a liberatory space where she can be her truest self, and where others may find the same comfort. "Meet me outside," she commands, coming across as a freaky, nocturnal creature, home in her natural ecosystem. But it's also funny in another context, the way she described the difference between Sabrina Carpenter's style and her's: bright and colorful vs. dark and edgy. The night is symbolic of both those things. It's also when a star shines brightest.
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