Amaarae at Buckhead Theatre [Photos]

Last week, Amaarae played a sold-out show at the Buckhead Theatre in Atlanta on the heels of her sophomore album Fountain Baby, which was released in June 2023 and met with across-the-board critical-acclaim. The Ghanaian-American singer-songwriter was raised between Atlanta and Accra, Ghana, and 20-song setlist marked a homecoming performance led by songs like “Fancy,” “Sociopathic Dance Queen” and “Co-Star,” which we named one of the best songs of last year.

In her write-up of “Co-Star,” critic Rachel Saywitz said that the track “is a garden of starry pleasures, perhaps the only response to someone (straight) who chastises against choosing partners based on horoscopes. Amaarae plays as its caretaker, playfully interrogating each of her potential lovers’ sun, moon and rising signs with a trickster’s eye, her light, staccato vocals keeping in time with the song’s lively backbeat. Threading it all together is a honeyed harp line which sounds plucked straight from Mount Olympus itself—after all, the way Amaarae flirtatiously captivates your ear can be nothing but God-like.”

Likewise, we named Fountain Baby one of the best pop albums of 2023. Head music editor Matt Mitchell wrote that the record “is a thrill ride from beginning to end, as the Ghanaian-American Afrobeats and pop singer/songwriter glides in and out of glitchy, alternative fame and multi-genre fusion” and boasts songs that are “built to shine and quake with every note, and it’s stacked atop precious dance boasts and mystifying grooves that shift like tectonic plates. She explores gender and sexuality in lucid, unfurled and unabashed ways.”