Hedonism can be a tricky topic in pop music. Indulgence can tip over into self-indulgence all too easily; holding back can result in a timidity that makes a song sound at odds with its subject. On her third album, the boundary-busting singer Amaarae has figured out the ideal leavening agent for her trips (In multiple senses of the word) through the world’s most luxurious hotspots: Head-over-stilettos love, which is only made sweeter by the mind-bending, globe-spanning musical maelstrom she helms over Black Star’s 13 tracks.
Amaarae is no stranger to the finer things. Her 2020 breakthrough hit “Sad Girlz Luv Money” blended her gossamer soprano with pumping beats and a take-no-shit attitude epitomized by its hook: “get the fuck outta my way/ I’m gonna get paid, yuh.” But on Black Star, she dives straight into the club, with the stalagmite synths of leadoff track “Stuck Up” acting as an exhilarating counterpoint to the string-laden opening of 2023’s luscious Fountain Baby. From there, it’s a sweaty, lusty thrill ride with Amaarae firmly in control of the pleasure sensors — for her and for any amorous targets she might pick up.
Bringing along a VVIP list of guests — among them bedroom auteur PinkPantheress, funk legend Charlie Wilson, and hyperpop visionary Bree Runway — Amaarae whirls through dance music’s past and future with bravado and bluster, as well as wide-eyed adoration for those who, as she details on the giddy “Girlie-Pop!,” will aid her in “switching genres till we make it pop” while Jersey club beats thunder and glitchy synths leave star trails around them. Amaarae’s zoomed-out-map view of pop’s world is intoxicating in ways beyond the effects of the narcotics reeled off in the 23rd-century dispatch “Starkilla”; on the hiccuping “She Is My Drug” she interpolates Cher before turning the word “rain” into a reflexive onomatopoeia, repeating it enough times to make the listener want to look outside their window.
The landscape isn’t all high-grade drugs and rafter-rattling rhythms; on the hazy PinkPantheress collab “Kiss Me Thru The Phone Pt 2,” which transforms the “Thong Song” strings into a music-box refrain, the lyrics’ eventual confessions of unrequited lust gives the fairy-dust-flecked sonic landscape a slightly sinister tone. But for Amaarae, there’s always another club to conquer, and another pair of eyes to lock into across the dancefloor.
