Pop Without Borders: Amaarae’s “Black Star” Rewrites the African Superstar Playbook

Amaarae’s third studio album, Black Star, arrives with the weight of high anticipation and the unmistakable scent of artistic reinvention. Known for her restless sonic curiosity, the Ghanaian-American star previously blurred Afrobeats, alté music, punkish electronics, and R&B into surreal pop across her earlier projects The Angel You Don’t Know (2020) and Fountain Baby (2023). Now, she takes a sharp turn: Black Star is a high-voltage plunge into the dance and electronic realm, dense with genre-bending impulses and an unapologetic embrace of global pop aesthetics.

While its cover art and pre-launch chatter — including the large Ghanaian flag-inspired bandana at the album’s pre-release livestream party — suggested a traditional tribute to her heritage, the final product is not quite what we expected. The Ghanaian homage is present, but subtle, woven into moments of language, reference, and collaboration rather than overarching sonics. Instead of taking African music global in the conventional sense, Amaarae asserts that African artists can claim the global stage without being tethered to a single genre. It’s a statement that is both forward-thinking and provocatively anti-boxing.

She had previously stated her belief that African music needs to evolve “in a direction that is fearless,” and made clear her desire to take her culture and “synthesize it in a way that feels fresh and unique.” With Black Star, she manages to achieve both, in a dazzling display of musical dexterity. She plays with the sounds that moved her in Accra when she was six, Atlanta when she was eight, and New Jersey when she was eleven. There’s a touch of the avant-garde edge of a Grace Jones or a Janelle Monáe, what with the fearless blend of high fashion, the sexual provocation, the overarching queerness of it all and the pan-African sound that makes for a fantastical spectrum of several sonical experiences at once. This is a project that is all encompassing, truly diasporic and truly global.

The album’s title itself is a triple entendre; it refers to the Pan-African emblem on the Ghanaian flag, the black diaspora as the root of dance music and Amaarae’s own rise to stardom (she is literally, a black star). With an expansive lineup of guests – including Naomi Campbell, Bree Runway, Pinkpanthress and Charlie Wilson – Amaarae builds a dizzying futuristic world revolving around the dancefloor as she hunts wildly for love, no matter how addictive or fleeting.

From the outset, Black Star plants itself firmly in rave territory, boasting wall to wall dance music. Tracks like the Brazilian funk-flavored opener Stuck Up (featuring a disembodied command to “Turn out the lights”) and the glossy, thumping Starkilla establish a hedonistic cycle of highs and crashes — a never-ending bender rendered in sound. Drug references, sometimes playful and sometimes pointed, thread through the project, aligning with what might best be described as a “cocaine-infused” energy bringing to mind 2024’s “brat summer”. The atmosphere is decadent, pan-global, and unabashedly queer, as heard on Ms60 where Naomi Campbell delivers ballroom-rooted commands — “strut, cunt, serve” —  over sleek production, or on She Is My Drug, which samples Cher’s 1998 electropop hit Believe while equating romantic intoxication to chemical highs.

On Black Star, Amaarae toys with genre as both structure and metaphor — “Flip positions, switching genres ’til you make it pop/Pretty pop, just a kiss, girly pop” — gliding between baile funk, trance, Jersey club, amapiano inflections, and even soft-pop dreamscapes. The ethereal Kiss Me Thru the Phone 2 with PinkPantheress offers a gentle, parasocial longing that contrasts the relentless pulse of the surrounding tracks, while B2B recalls the sensuality of Fountain Baby, functioning as a momentary comedown before the next surge of energy.

Her guest list reinforces Black Star’s global ambition: fellow Ghanaian Bree Runway joins on the genre-fluid Starkilla; Charlie Wilson makes an unexpected appearance on Dream Scenario for a diasporic R&B twist; Zacari trades verses with her on the Jersey club-flared 100DRUM; and the closing anthem Free The Youth tips its hat to a Ghanaian youth culture collective while beginning and ending in Twi.

Even when she nods to nostalgia, as on Fineshyt with its early-2000s club energy, Amaarae reframes the reference through her own lens. This is not a unified cultural manifesto so much as a recalibration of Afropop’s future — one where geography doesn’t dictate sound, and where the club is a legitimate site of personal mythmaking. 

Her experimentation is not limited to the album’s thematic direction or to its futuristic production, but extends to control over her own vocal ability. Dove Cameron mixes her voice at its most delicate, and then suddenly, it dips, deepens to a seductive drawl; “I need a brat, she do what she want/ If you got some ass, then come to the front”. Multifaceted to the core, duality and contradiction flow throughout this song and extend to the rest of the album. 

In a 2020 interview with METAL following the release of The Angel You Don’t Know, she spoke wistfully about her artistry, mapping out what fans could expect from her over the next few years; “With the kind of exposure I’ve had, it was inevitable for me to just try on all these different styles. In a way, it’s me trying to keep my childhood alive. My songs now are just me reliving and recreating the feelings attached to certain memories.” 

If there’s a consistent theme linking all the tracks on this album, it’s escapism, a good time. Whether through the intoxication of love, the literal invocation of substances, or the disorienting swirl of genre shifts, Black Star invites the listener into a world that is at once alien and deeply human. It’s energetic, dizzyingly beautiful at points, and occasionally overwhelming — much like the club culture it draws from. For those seeking neatly categorized African pop, this may be frustrating. But for lovers of dance music and those open to Amaarae’s vision of global artistry without borders, Black Star stands as her boldest statement yet: alien, sexy, uncensored and entirely hers.