Amaarae rising

The Ghanaian American star has her eyes on global domination

- TOMÁS MIER

WHEN YOU MEET Amaarae, it's hard not to notice how much deeper her speaking voice is compared with the sweet falsetto she constantly deploys in her music. It's all intentional: "There's a sensitivity and a vulnerability that I get to tap into in my music that isn't very easy for me to express," she tells me under the shade of a teahouse at the Japanese Garden outside Los Angeles. "Deep down, I'm a sensitive and mushy person."

Amaarae has been thinking a lot about who she really is. She's currently hard at work on Black Star, her upcoming third album, which sees her diving deeper into her identity as both a woman and an artist. The album title is a triple entendre referencing herself, the Ghanaian flag, and the Black cultural roots of the dance music she blends on the record. For the 30-year-old musician, whose real name is Ama Genfi, there's been a power to finding herself - and allowing herself to be vulnerable as an artist has given her strength. "There's a switch that flips. There's a confidence and big-dick energy to it," she says. "It's a version of me that takes over."

Black Star arrives two years after Amaarae released her critically acclaimed LP Fountain Baby, which featured the avant-garde alt-Afropop hit 'Angels in Tibet', and follows a string of high-profile moments that have cemented her as an artist's artist. Over the past couple of years, she has opened for Kaytranada and Sabrina Carpenter, collaborated several times across Childish Gambino's Bando Stone & the New World, and she made history as the first Ghanaian solo female act to perform at Coachella. "[It] was a huge turning point because before, my shows would mainly be, like, young Black kids, young African kids," she says. "There's clearly been a shift here. Now, it's much more of a global representation and melting point, which brings me a huge sense of pride."