There are three things Amaarae can’t tour without — and no, it isn’t coke, ketamine, and molly, despite what her song “Starkilla” suggests. Think more along the lines of a sauna, a daily stretch routine, and a bathroom floor so clean she could eat off of it.
“Because I’m a huge germaphobe,” she said over the phone from her home in LA. “The slightest thing will put me off, and if I can’t shower because the bathroom is not clean, bro, my whole day is ruined.”
These mindful measures are key, since, in reality, Amaarae is a self-described homebody. But listen to her new album “Black Star,” which she’s promoting with a tour across New York, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and Toronto, and you wouldn’t know.
Between lyrics about sex, drugs, and spiking drinks, the Ghanaian-American’s public persona is built on being in the club. But the moment she is away from her natural habitat, “it just starts to mess with my mind.”
Now, the rising star may be on the cusp of something big.
Following her critically acclaimed sophomore album, “Fountain Baby” (2023), “Black Star” was breathlessly reviewed across the music press in August, with Rolling Stone calling it a “masterclass in controlled hedonism.”
In the last two years, she has toured with Childish Gambino, the musical alter ego of Donald Glover, Kaytranada, and was personally requested by Sabrina Carpenter to open her viral Short N’ Sweet tour in September 2024.
This summer, she performed at Glastonbury, the UK’s largest music festival, for the first time, and made her Jimmy Kimmel Live debut earlier this fall. It was also the year Amaarae became the first solo Ghanaian female act to perform at Coachella — a lifelong dream, according to the artist.
“It’s one thing to dream of something, then it’s another to be forever etched in history as the first person to achieve it from your country,” she said.
Born Ama Serwah Genfi, Amaarae grew up between New Jersey, Georgia, and Ghana’s capital, Accra. And while each of her hometowns has shaped her music in some way, it’s her West African roots that informed this record.
Blending influences from Bacardi, a form of South African dance music, and the fast percussion of the French Caribbean zouk scene with “ghetto tech” (a Detroit-style electronic mash-up of house, techno, bass, and hip-hop),
Amaarae is recontextualizing African music, infusing it with pop elements, including high-pitched vocals, samples from Cher, and a guest feature from Naomi Campbell.
And if you aren’t sonically adept enough to pick up on all this, the message is explicit in her album cover — the bold tricolour Ghanaian flag remade with Amaarae, dressed in a latex catsuit, as its black star.
It’s a sartorial vibe she intends to bring to the stage. “I think about how I want the show to feel. I want it to be really gritty, dirty drums, dirty guitars, just lots of bass.
So, when I think about clothes, I think of leather and latex. I think about having on dark shades. I feel about skirts, mini skirts. I love boots,” she said. “That’s what it feels like to me, just holding that energy of what it means just to be f***ing black, head to toe.”
She opened her performance in New York wearing a sports jacket by Martine Rose and a tulle skirt by Simone Rocha — two cult favorite British designers only the truly fashion-forward would know of.
When asked about designers she’d like to work with today, she nodded to Haider Ackermann’s recent collection for Tom Ford at Paris Fashion Week last month. “I think that was definitely the show of the year,” she said.
Breaking The Pop Star Mold
While some may struggle to define Amaarae’s genre-bending music, she knows exactly who she is. “To me, I’m a pop star,” she said, though she is keenly aware that those higher up in the industry might not “put me in that category.”
“Let me choose my words carefully, because I was about to say something crazy,” she continued. “I think the term of what a pop star is has changed completely, and is almost exclusively reserved for White girls.” Missy Elliott, Janet Jackson, Tracy Chapman, Queen Latifah — these were the pop stars of her generation, at least to Amaarae. “We just don’t live in that world anymore,” she said.
