Amaarae is sounding expensive these days. Not necessarily in a material sense, though there is mention of vintage Impalas, box-fresh Mowalolas, and copious Dior drip. Rather her voice is extra luxurious, her music lavish with instrumentation: violins and cellos, a Japanese koto, ethereal harps, West African dounoun and kora, steel pan drums, an authoritative horn section. It flows, it saunters, it boasts, connected by Amaarae’s sweet soprano, lilting to the gods. The fountain in question here is pussy, but it’s also so much more. It’s Fountain Baby, the fascinating tale of a woman who wants the world, but who is also wise enough to accept that serpents follow glory. Unlike many of her pop contemporaries, Amaarae has an innate sense of consequences; balling and boning is not an escapist lifestyle, nor an empty canvas on which to craft cliché party bops for buying apple-scented body wash at CVS. There are some stakes to being rich, sexy, and messy.
Before Amaarae reckons with the dark side of abundance, she’s simply out here having too much fun. On Fountain Baby’s single, “Co-Star,” she and executive producers KZ DidIt and Kyu Steed adorn the syncopated rhythm with crystalline synths and Amaarae’s playful needling about astrological signs, somewhere between a meme (“Them Libra bitches horrible”) and a sardonic document of her dating life. By the second song, the dreamy baile funk-inspired reverie “Angels in Tibet,” she’s singing, “I want to fuck a puddle” with an almost diaphanous euphoria, like she’s high on sex and nitrous, floating through the night.
Her themes of desire and fuckery are vivid and emotionally complex. Even her flex meditations generally avoid tropes: On “Reckless and Sweet,” she gently chronicles a lover who’s interested “’cause my money just too long/The thought of me spending gives you goosebumps,” a golddigger lullaby that self-indicts, too—the downside of love and money, it seems, is having too much of the latter. Women want to use her, though she seems to return the favor: “Fuck you and give you away,” she sings breathlessly on “Disguise,” “You know I just wanted to play.” It’s a heartbreak song disguised as pillow talk, synths simmering as submerged bass titters courtesy KZ, Kyu, Glaswegian producer S-Type, and Yves Tumor collaborator Yves Rothman.
Amaarae has always stated her intent to make futurist Afropop. Her itinerant upbringing—born in the Bronx, raised in Atlanta and Accra—informs her creative ambitions, as do some of the musical inspirations she’s namechecked in a press release: Missy, Janet, Britney, though their more outré jams are better touchstones for pop gems like “Sociopathic Dance Queen” and “Princess Going Digital.” “Counterfeit” opens with a live-instrumentation cover of Clipse’s “Wamp Wamp (What It Do),” a fire nod to one of Pharrell’s more genius productions (he gets a writing credit). Amaarae keeps within the Hell Hath No Fury rubric, too, rapping about printing money and riding around shining, though somewhere in the generational shift, communal joy seeped into Push and Malice’s characteristic nihilism: “Thirty bitches in the crib,” Amaarae raps, “And they all getting paid!” The track’s urgency dissipates a bit from the sing-songy chorus, but it doesn’t really matter: This shit’s going to smash TikTok’s cakes to smithereens.
Though she never acknowledges it outright, pending anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Ghana, which would ostensibly outlaw Amaarae’s music, looms in the background of her vision of sex and danger. On “Wasted Eyes,” a midtempo burner with a 13-piece orchestra and a percussive glock, she nearly whispers, “Hottie million with a milli on me/I wanna ménage with the blicky on me.” Flirting with sexual danger is one thing, but our gal is still clear-eyed, with a punchline designed to cut the trifling at the knees: “You love me with no honor.” On “Sociopathic Dance Queen,” a candy pop gem about a doomed hookup at a bad party, the “acid pussy” is just too dangerous. On “Sex, Violence, Suicide” a watery, stream-of-consciousness acoustic guitar lament for a toxic relationship, she zags into a raucous, snotty guitar punk, à la her first album’s “D*A*N*G*E*R*O*U*S.”
Whether she’s enjoying the complicated life of a baller or indulging in the fantasy of it, her cool ease is dreamy and comely; her frustrated desire transforms into beauty by the velvety way she sings it, even as she reflects on louche situationships and the pain of lovers with ulterior motives. By the final track, when she sings a distorted guitar anthem about how her girl works the pole and then comes home to god—and the god happens to be “Alimony Ama,” her own nickname—no one’s more aware of the irony than Amaarae herself, as she looks to a higher power for a sign she won’t heed. “Shawty say she love me like she love the lord,” she intones breathily. “When I’m in that pussy I’m above the law/If I had the world I still would end it all/A thousand and one reasons not to get involved.” No doubt she’ll do it anyway.
