Amaarae doesn’t whisper to seduce; she whispers because she can. Black Star, her third full-length, is an album built from soft command: airy, controlled, often strange, and quietly assured in its ambition. The Ghanaian-American artist has always dealt in intimacy and eclecticism, but here, she stretches her reach into something messier, more transnational, more interested in tension than resolution as she enlists Naomi Campbell, PinkPantheress, Charlie Wilson, Bree Runway and Starkillers to strengthen the track list and engross the fans.
‘Stuck Up’ opens the record like a memory of a party you half-remember: bubbling synths, clipped lyrics, and a beat that loops and insists. It’s club music, but cracked at the edges. ‘Starkilla’ lurches into hyper-gloss, glossy pop-bass and auto-tune smeared all over the vocals like lip gloss on glass. The formula shouldn’t work. But in Amaarae’s world, the clash is the point.
There’s play everywhere: the amapiano-tinged ‘ms60’, all log drums and syrupy bounce, is the most straightforward dancefloor moment. ‘Kiss Me Thru The Phone pt.2’, with PinkPantheress, is perhaps the album’s most effective experiment: hyperpop filtered through a lo-fi blender, squeaky and sweet but never saccharine. It sounds like heartbreak in a glitchy group chat.
Amaarae doesn’t write love songs so much as she bends around the idea of them. ‘B2B’ is DJ jargon turned bedroom confession. ‘She Is My Drug’ oozes submission and promise, delicate as lace. ‘Girlie Pop!’ flirts with nursery-rhyme cadence, infuriating or inspired, depending on your tolerance for pop’s current girlhood obsession. ‘Slut Me Out/S.M.O.’, on the other hand, goes all the way, highlife rhythms meeting kpanlogo grooves, all in service of self-declared pleasure. It’s sweaty, bright, unapologetic.
Even when the songs falter – the clunky ‘Dove Cameron’, or the over-filtered ‘Dream Scenario’ – they fail interestingly. This isn’t a pristine album. It mutates, glitches, repeats itself. ‘100DRUM’ drowns in its own effects before gasping for air with a melodic hook. ‘FREE THE YOUTH’ closes the record in an almost spiritual swell, somewhere between a stadium chant and a jazz club improv. Saxophones? Strings? Doesn’t matter. It moves.
Amaarae premiered many of these songs on the Coachella main stage in 2025, the first Ghanaian artist to do so. She shaved her head mid-set. Called it a symbol. It played like performance art, or maybe just release. That moment mirrors Black Star’s ethos: liberation through excess, through contradiction, through refusal.
Built across continents – Miami, Accra, LA, São Paulo – the album doesn’t pick sides. It moves like diaspora: house, ghettotech, baile funk, azonto, highlife – all spliced with a voice that’s more breath than body. “What does being Ghanaian mean to me?” she asks. This album is her answer, fractured, futuristic, unfinished, and full of pride.
