The 29-year-old singer-songwriter Amaarae made the most acclaimed album of the year. But she’s not exactly a star—yet.
This year, the 29-year-old Ghanaian American singer-songwriter Amaarae took, to use a technical term, a big swing. With a voice of feathery beauty and songs blending R&B, hip-hop, rock, and Afropop, she had already earned buzz for her 2020 debut album, The Angel You Don’t Know. On the follow-up, Fountain Baby, released this past June, she pushed the scope and detail of her music, channeling the dirty swagger of Rihanna and the global futurism of Missy Elliott. Amaarae cheekily boasted in a behind-the-scenes video that she’d soon have a “10-times platinum, worldwide hit,” adding, “I’m about to be on my Taylor Swift shit.”
So when I met with her at a hotel restaurant during New York Fashion Week in September, I was unsurprised to see her looking the part of a pop star. She showed up in chunky biker boots (vintage Chanel) and a red-lettered tank top emblazoned with her own slogan: SEXY, HOT & SLIGHTLY PSYCHOTIC. That she was ambitious was obvious—but I wanted to know how ambitious. What were her career dreams?
“I would love to go into soundtrack curation,” she told me, adding that she adores animated films. “If I ever have kids, just thinking about the future, it would be a more relaxed kind of job.” She brought up the Rock’s voice-acting role in Moana, a movie his own daughter watches. “That’s something that he can really share with her,” she said. “I think that’d be so fire.”
This was not exactly the response I’d been expecting. It sounded like a plan for retirement, not world domination. Amaarae made Fountain Baby with hopes of becoming “as big as Beyoncé,” she said, “but over time, I’ve started to realign those goals.” The album is the most acclaimed musical release of 2023 according to Metacritic, but it hasn’t generated major hits or made her a household name. She’s giving the album “12 to 18 months” to “reach the masses,” but she’s also thinking about what’s next.
Such practicality might seem antithetical to the bad-bitch persona that she and so many young performers clearly seek to embody. But part of the modern hustle is not getting too attached to one idea of success. A generation of musicians, raised studying popular culture through screens, has arrived in the public eye with fully formed aesthetics and a smart sense for how to play the music industry’s games. Our era of twitchy attention spans and fractured audiences, however, has made the very concept of stardom fleeting and hard to define.
One of the big storylines of the year in music has in fact been a dearth of new voices to unite the masses. In August, Billboard reported that record-label employees were feeling “depressed” about their inability to break artists in a big way; though social media regularly vaults unknown talents into the spotlight, the oversaturation of the music marketplace makes it tough to build on the momentum from a fluke hit. Also in August, The New York Times ran a much-discussed piece about pop’s “middle class.” The designation referred to singers such as Troye Sivan and Charli XCX: Their sounds and attitude evoke the likes of Madonna or Michael Jackson, but their followings are about the size of a good indie band.
So far, Amaarae is another example of that class. Two years ago, a remix of her song “Sad Gurlz Luv Money”—from her debut album—sparked a TikTok dance trend involving smooth arm movements and wobbling knees. But she told me she generally finds her era’s music to be uninspiring: Precious few artists seem to be taking risks anymore. When recording her second album, she thought a lot about Britney Spears’s Blackout and the oeuvre of Ye (formerly Kanye West)—landmark mass-market entertainments of the 2000s that oozed provocation and polish. Her vision for Fountain Baby: “It’s cinematic, but it’s still hip-hop.”
She likened the album’s creation process to reaching the famed “10,000 hours” benchmark for mastery of a trade. Amaarae had been making music since she was a teenager, learning from YouTube tutorials and using ripped software. But she wanted to take charge of the professionalized, collaborative process that record-industry titans use to create hits. At songwriting camps in Los Angeles and in Ghana, she assembled teams of musicians to throw around ideas. In one session, the R&B veteran Babyface taught her about his method of counting syllables for each line of lyrics—a lesson in rigor that led her to rewrite what had been a more-or-less-finished album.
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Far from feeling committee-tested or formulaic, the resulting album is ornate, employing intricate rhythms, Arabic scales, and diverse sounds: harp, emo guitars, sampled gunshots. The most distinctive ingredient is her high, soft coo, which tends to be described as a “baby voice.” In conversation, Amaarae speaks in a husky drawl, punctuating her sentences with “bro.” But when singing, she plays a character—that of “a very naughty child that shouldn’t say certain things,” as she put it to me.
This happy embrace of artificiality is part of the point of the music. One of the album’s standout tracks, “Counterfeit,” repurposes a clanging beat that Pharrell and Chad Hugo created for the rap duo Clipse in 2006. Amaarae first ripped the beat from YouTube, then enlisted a Congolese band to re-create it on traditional drums and kora. To write the song’s lyrics, she asked Maesu, one of her songwriting partners, to come up with lines about breast augmentation. (She added gleefully that her collaborators, mostly “tough guys,” allow themselves to get “super feminine” in the creation process.)
For all of the album’s eclecticism, however, she didn’t want it marketed as anything but a collection of general-interest bangers. “Fountain Baby is a pop album above all else,” read an info sheet sent to journalists. “It should not be pigeonholed solely as an ‘Afrobeats’ project.” Amaarae was born in the Bronx, and since her youth has split her time between the U.S. and Ghana. But early in her career, media coverage tended to focus on the Ghana portion of her biography, which missed the point of what she’s doing: “I think that African music right now is popular music,” Amaarae said.
She mentioned “Calm Down,” a collaboration between Selena Gomez and the Nigerian singer Rema that’s been one of the biggest hits of the year. A few nights before we’d talked, it won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Afrobeats. The category was brand new, and some Afrobeats fans online expressed annoyance that the accolade went to a song anchored by an American celebrity. But Amaarae said she saw the win as important, even though it revealed a “necessary evil”: “If you want to break into [the American mainstream], you’ve got to go and get the pop stars.”
She alluded to pressures from her label to find a pop star of her own to team up with. “I’m like, Bro, give it time,” she said. “I’m making it a real point to say that I am going to make one, or multiple, of these songs hits on my own.” Every day, she was noticing more reviews and more comments about her music online. “Slowly but surely, it’s spreading,” she said. (A month after we talked, she had her second TikTok hit with the Fountain Baby track “Angels in Tibet,” which inspired more dancing.)
As we got up to leave the restaurant, a young man sitting at the bar stopped us. Eyes wide, he showed Amaarae his phone: He’d been listening to Fountain Baby on the way in, and he had tickets to see her on tour next year. Outside on the sidewalk, she told me that this sort of encounter was becoming more common. “It’s kinda throwing me a little bit,” she said. “This is what I mean about the slow burn.” I said farewell and turned to leave—just as another stranger approached, looking starstruck.
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