Amaarae – ‘Black Star’ review

Amaarae has always been that girl: unbothered by rules, genre lines or whether her voice was ever ‘conventionally’ suited to the spotlight. Her 2020 debut album ‘The Angel You Don’t Know’ blurred Afrobeats, alté and punkish electronics with heady confidence, and its sequel – 2023’s ‘Fountain Baby’ – layered Arabic scales and R&B into surreal pop, cementing her as Ghana’s avant-garde pop juggernaut.

The former NME Cover star, though, steps fully into her popstar era on her dizzying headrush of a third album, ‘Black Star’. The title itself is a triple entendre, nodding to Ghana’s Pan-African emblem, Black diaspora as the root of dance music and her own rise to stardom. With a superteam of guests – including Naomi Campbell, Bree Runway and Charlie Wilson – Amaarae builds a thrilling alien world that worships the dancefloor as she goes feral for love, no matter how indulgent, deep, fleeting or yearnful.

On the empowering ‘ms60’ – a nod to popular noughties fashion brand Miss Sixty – Amaarae struts around while the sliding drill synths slice through skittering Afrobeats percussion, and deep amapiano log drums rumble like runway thunder. Naomi Campbell steps in – not as a vocalist, but as a catwalk general – commanding, co-signing and hyping Amaarae up (“Pivot pose… Bitch… Serve… Go”), turning the track into a masterclass in poise and power: key ingredients for self-love.

Then, there’s a flash of danger amid the high-glam and chemical euphoria that courses through ‘Black Star’. On ‘She Is My Drug’, Amaarae flips the chorus of Cher’s iconic ‘Believe’ (“Do you believe in love off the drugs?”) for a fearless exploration of longing and self-destruction that feels both vivid and universally relatable, because – in this case – romance is a gluttonous luxury you fiend over.

Amaarae’s obsession with love is evident elsewhere, too. ‘Dove Cameron’, named after the child-star-turned-pop-disruptor, is not Disney sweetness at all as she switches between falsetto and a deeper, dominatrix drawl: “I need a brat, she do what she want / If you got some ass, then come to the front.” On ‘100Drum’, that darkens: the tamborzão beat creeps and Amaarae’s voice sometimes drops to a low, robotic growl – much more cutthroat and paranoid, especially when the track ascends into Jersey club-inspired chaos.

‘Kiss Me Thru The Phone Pt. 2’ with PinkPantheress is where Amaarae is at her most love-starved. Over an ambient, trance-washed flip of Sisqó’s ‘Thong Song’, the duo mewl through parasocial longing, caught between thirst and despair. Pink’s wide-eyed desperation (“Is there somebody / Somebody, somebody / Somebody there?”) clashes with Amaarae’s obsessive hunger: “I soak my favourite sheets / At the thought you’d be with me.”.

By the final stretch, Amaarae’s fantasy world is fully realised: weird, horny and not confined to what ‘African pop’ should be. ‘Black Star’ isn’t the diasporic spectacle she originally hinted at – it’s a hedonistic pop recalibrator that hits no matter where you’re from. The Ghanaian nods are subtle, while the record leans hard into baile funk, trance and Jersey club’s jittery backbone. It’s less a unified cultural manifesto and more Amaarae staking her claim on the future of Afropop: bold, unfiltered, and unapologetically hers.

Details

• Record label: Golden Child / Interscope
• Release date: August 8, 2025

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