Amaarae’s Zodiac of Love, Money, Confidence and Sex

A year ago last month, Ama Serwah Genfi—who performs as Amaarae—released her second-ever LP, Fountain Baby, and was met with a deluge of acclaim. It landed highly on many year-end lists, as did songs like “Co-Star,” “Princess Goes Digital” and “Sociopathic Dance Queen.” After her phenomenal, breakthrough debut The Angel You Don’t Know and its fusion of Southern rap, R&B and chart-worthy pop turned her into something of a young auteur, her track “Sad Girlz Luv Money” found virality on TikTok and put her into the stratosphere. She called upon Kali Uchis for a remix in 2021 and it went global, cementing Amaarae as a star on the rise. So it should have come as no surprise that Fountain Baby would arrive as instant-classic material full of rap, punk, soul and club-pop vignettes collaged into a one-of-a-kind sensation. And the 30-year-old multi-hyphenate knows how good the album is, too, consciously talking about the kudos it’s been given and using it as a marker. “I feel like, in this day and age, it’s very tough for an artist to still have a record that’s being talked about a year after its release,” she tells me from Paris, where she is about to walk the runaway in a Vogue fashion show. “I’ve seen so many albums come out this summer and, still, Fountain Baby is a big part of the conversation.”

While Fountain Baby isn’t having a Brat Summer, Amaarae’s year-old, unconventional-yet-resounding triumph is still just as urgent today as it was in June 2023. She has over 6 million monthly listeners on Spotify now, and this fall she’ll be hitting the road with Sabrina Carpenter—who’s had two Top 3 hits on the Hot 100 chart this year alone, and just sold-out many of the dates on her upcoming North American tour—in the fall. “Angels in Tibet” and “Reckless & Sweet” have both been streamed over 100 million times combined, and the former picked up some buzz on the internet months after Fountain Baby’s release and wound up with a remix pack in April.

Amaarae’s luxurious daydreams invoke everything from Dior to Mowalola. She sings about wanting to fuck puddles and having spending habits that give her goosebumps. In Amaarae’s world, there are 30 bitches in the crib and they’re all getting paid. She’s covering Clipse and singing about “acid pussy,” talking about touch, touch, touch, touch, touch, touch and situationships, album title tattoos and three-digit push-ups. And the thing about Amaarae’s music is that most of it is so bulletproof, sensual, infectious and welcoming that she doesn’t have to be so intentional with getting it in front of people. Sure, a recent world tour that ran across Germany, the UK, Netherlands and North America has kept Fountain Baby in the spotlight and given her fans a chance to hear songs from it and The Angel You Don’t Know live for the first time ever—but, like life itself, Amaarae’s work often finds its way organically and spectacularly. And all of it is such a splendid portrait of a baller who isn’t naive about the consequences of such a lifestyle, you can’t help but buy into it while also puting an asterisk next to the euphoria. Be emotional and be complex, but, as Amaarae contends, the highs of love, money and freedom have got lows, too.

And her relationship with the Fountain Baby songs has transformed over the last year now that they’ve been translated for the stage—especially “Reckless & Sweet,” which is her personal, raw offering to her audiences, as she stands on stage alone with a guitar and lets the stripped-back catchiness of “call me when the money come, come, come, come, come” contradict the rest of Fountain Baby’s boisterous swag in clubs packed from wall to wall. Amaarae doesn’t have a mega-huge production budget, because she is still “very much an artist that’s coming into their own,” so all she can do is tell the story through costumes, communication and the “truth to singing the song.” Every night, she wears a bright red armored suit that makes her feel irresistible and “like a superhero stepping out onto that stage” and showering the room in egoless power, confidence and self-respect. Through dramatic, white strobe lighting and a fierce, attention-commanding palette of red and black, she creates a sense of urgency and drama and beckons people into her world before turning it into a party. It’s a challenge to her and to her fans as well, a production begging every open ear to think about and appreciate the musical language and phrasings in more pronounced ways over and over again—and to film those performances and upload them online, creating a still-growing archive of a career still being built piece-by-piece.

She was skeptical about including “Sex, Violence, Suicide” in her setlists, because she felt like the song was “out of the realm of Amaarae.” “I did that record on the album just because I love punk music and I wanted to do a punk song,” she says, “but performing it on stage and seeing how people rage to it and how much they enjoy that surprise element of spurt where it’s like, ‘Oh, shit, where the fuck did she just take us?’ has been really cool to watch, because I didn’t think audiences would respond well to that record. I’ve kept it in every set and it’s developed and it’s grown, because people love it.” “Angels in Tibet” has been her most malleable song—as it has lived onstage with string-arrangements, stripped-back intimacies and, notably, a club edge fit for drunk and high festival-goers. “I don’t have the advantage of dancers or of anything else besides me, the band and some lights,” Amaarae says. “At that point, all you can really do is step on stage and sing “Angels in Tibet” like you fucking mean it.”

Amaarae was born in the Bronx and raised in Atlanta, New Jersey and Accra, Ghana. She’s lived in London and traveled across the world to model, perform, process and expel. Identity is a big part of the music she makes, and being African especially means the world to her. She calls The Angel You Don’t Know and Fountain Baby “Afrofusion” albums, as they are entrenched in every facet of her DNA. It’s like that lyric from “Hellz Angel” four years ago: “I don’t make songs, bitch, I make memories.” We’re talking about a pop starlet whose influences range from Meat Puppets to Erykah Badu to Fall Out Boy. The first song she ever wrote was a riff on Usher’s “Same Girl”; on “Hellz Angel,” she samples Hi-Posi’s “Boku de Aritai.” “If I wouldn’t have been in Mount Olive, New Jersey in 2007, I would have never heard Blackout by Britney Spears—and that is an essential album for me, as an artist and as a human being,” Amaarae says. “If I wouldn’t have been in Atlanta in 2003, I would have never followed that pipeline and found artists like Young Thug. It’s all rooted in identity—the places I’ve been, the people I’ve met, the people that have influenced me, whether it was just one conversation, one party, or being in school.”

So, when Amaarae and her collaborators—Cracker Mallo, Geo Jordan, Kyu Steed, Kztheproducer, Yves Rothman, Pheelz and S-Type, just to name a few—were making Fountain Baby, they had the idea of longevity in mind, hellbent on making something as eternal as the music they grew up on. “That’s why we put so much work into it,” Amaarae says, “and that’s why it took three years—because we wanted the records to be able to sustain over a long period of time.” “Princess Going Digital” saw its popularity burn slowly, but her widely-beloved live shows and the imagery and choreography around it have given the song a longer lifespan. Despite “Angels in Tibet” being her “big streamer,” “Princess Going Digital” is the joint that, whenever it comes up in the setlist, audiences go berserk over it. It’s a festival favorite and, like “Co-Star,” a track that Amaarae and her team knew would be a select that’s immune to going stale. “We spent a lot of time on the records because we wanted them to have longevity,” she adds, “because we wanted people to continue to play them over and over and over. We did the work to ensure that, and we’re seeing that manifest right before our eyes.”

If you’ve been following the language Amaarae uses around her music over the years, you might have already picked up on her nonchalant use of “record” instead of “song.” Though many of us have openly wondered what the difference is between Record of the Year and Song of the Year at the Grammys, Amaarae never second-guesses the classification, calling it a “force of habit,” and, admittedly, she thinks about her songwriting in “an old-fashioned way.” “When I think about a song that I really love, like ‘Dreams’ by Fleetwood Mac, I think abou the longevity of that record and how it’s transcended from my grandmother’s generation to my mother’s generation to my generation,” she says. “I’ve watched a lot of Fleetwood Mac documentaries, I see the work that it took to get ‘Dreams’ from A to B to the point where it touches so many souls and so many people. The work that has gone into crafting this music, to me, is what makes it a record.” Amaarae is a student of music who looks at her work in an intentional way. “You put so much love and so much effort and so much development into these songs that I think they’re more than songs,” she continues. “They last. To me, that’s what a recording does. That’s what a record does.”

Amaarae, too, looks at music through two different lenses, be it through remixes, reinventions or fresh reckonings. “As much as it is emotional and it is about capturing and delivering that emotion, I think it’s scientific and academic, as well,” she says. “I start off by gathering sources, and that source material ranges everywhere—books, albums, DVDs, films—and I just read and I listen and watch, because I want to get inspired.” She questions what expressions she wants to make, through the sonics and the storytelling, treating the act of album-making as if she’s a student writing a thesis or a research paper. She takes her sources, creates ideas and then takes them to her producers. “I want to see what someone else is seeing that I’ve probably been too involved to see or to communicate,” Amaarae continues. “It’s taking taste and making it academic. Some of the best curators in the world are avid learners and study years of their craft and other crafts and can really, really explain to you why they do what they do and what inspires what they do. They can point you to source material and they can point you to specific inspirational points. I think that the world is missing that.”

What she loves about being a curator is what comes after inspiration—how the curiosity continues to grow and grow far into the songwriting process and beyond each album’s incubation time in the studio. It’s never just a one-time, in-the-moment reference that gets tossed to the wayside after release day. Her biggest citation is Janet Jackson, specifically Janet and The Velvet Rope—the latter of which being her favorite because of the music’s “hardcore gentleness.” “It’s hard and soft at the same time, and it pushes boundaries but it’s not forceful. It’s not abrasive,” Amaarae says. “But then, I think about the execution of all of the visuals and how everything is so lush and so beautiful and so sexy but still wounded, and Janet Jackson loving people and loving community and expressing that through her visuals—that DNA has stuck with me since I was probably 19 years old, through every single project that I’ve done, so much so to the point where, every time I start research on a new project, the first song, video, interview I reference is from Janet Jackson.” When concocting the expressive visuals for Fountain Baby, Amaarae especially took pointers from Janet, chasing the same projections of sensuality and softness found in Miss Jackson’s “That’s the Way Love Goes” and “Miss You Much” videos.

Over the last five years, Amaarae has established a reputation for her features and guest-spots. She’s worked with everyone from 6LACK to Janelle Monaé to KAYTRAMINÉ and Moliy, even teasing that a collaboration with Childish Gambino is on the way, too (which will likely make for some good onstage energy when she hits the road with him in December). Working with other high-profile voices is her favorite thing to do, because it allows her to come outside of her element and embrace new challenges. And she’s quite intentional about who she is occupying that space with. “That KAYTRAMINÉ record, ‘Sossaup,’ I get to really rap and show a whole new side of my skill set,” she says. “And then we come to an artist like Janelle, where there’s me alone doing poetry on the record and I just get to be very laid back and sultry. It’s the different parts of myself that I can tap into, and the way that these artists show so much grace and so much love and so much respect to that process and trust me with their work, it’s so precious, for them to be like, ‘You know what, do you, because I think you’ll know where to take it.’”

Despite her only having two studio albums out, Apple Music recently curated its own 15-song, 46-minute “Amaarae: Love Songs” playlist, a designation that makes sense—given that she is a self-proclaimed “lover girl.” And songwriting is the one tried-and-true place where she can be completely vulnerable. Love songs are always abundant, especially in the current pop continuum, but Amaarae brings a certain grace and brag to her swollen-hearted odes and effigies (“I can’t find nobody that can manage, but then I found you,” she sings on “Princess Going Digital”). “I think that writing love songs, to me, was my way to express that escape in my personal life—because, for years, I haven’t been really great at expressing love and that emotion in my romantic and my platonic relationships. That’s where love songs play a role in my life and in my catalog: it’s the only place where I don’t feel afraid to speak about love, to embrace love, to be fully immersed in the emotion of love.”

On Fountain Baby, Amaarae doesn’t just embrace her affection for love songs, she adorns the album with references to the Zodiac and water signs—especially on “Co-Star,” where she translates sexuality and attraction into the calendar and the constellations, singing “fuck ‘til moon and rising” like it’s her last will and testament. She is a Cancer, after all. “Water signifies sensitivity and depth, but also volatility,” she explains. “When I think about Cancers, Pisces and Scorpios, I think the water signs really encapsulate that sensitivity, volatility, malleability and emotional depth. When it comes to thinking about astrology and when it comes to thinking about the role that water plays in my music, it really is that whole idea of vulnerability.” There’s a sensuality in that for Amaarae, as there is a preciousness, softness and kindness. Music is her escape and where she gets to tell the truth about who she is, what she believes and what she hopes to see in the world. If love songs are vital cells in Amaarae’s DNA, then the link between astrology and music-making is the lifeblood coursing through her body .

“Water holds so much data and information, and that data is rooted in human emotion,” she continues. “And water is a beautiful thing, because it moves through the whole earth. The thing about water is that it’s been alive longer than our ancestors; it’s probably one of the few things that really has held the truth of data and emotion and nature and has continued to sustain and has continued to recycle. I think that, when it comes to just thinking about holding that much emotion and being so open with it is very important to me. There’s other artists who tend to make more airy music or make more fiery music or make more earthy music but, for me, water holds so much. It’s a great tool for communicating.”

At the end of last month, Amaarae released roses are red, tears are blue, a deluxe-edition of Fountain Baby with seven extra songs. While she disclosed a year ago that many songs from the Fountain Baby sessions were left on the cutting-room floor, all of roses are red, tears are blue is new material recorded between October 2023 and April 2024—a period of time Amaarae was “going through hell.” “It’s so funny, because the album was dropping and everyone was so excited about it and I was having the worst time of my life, just figuring things out,” she explains. “I was going through so many transitions and changes, and the only place that I could go and speak and say what was on my mind and be vulnerable was on a song.” roses are red, tears are blue is what she calls “the final chapter” of Fountain Baby—a gentle, more-subdued conclusion to the celebratory, “ignant,” balls-to-the-wall, haphazard and tumultuous swagger of its source material rather than some standalone EP. “At the end of this character of Fountain Baby—or, myself—we’ve shed all the tears, we’ve shed the old skin, we’ve lost the friends, we’ve lost love,” Amaarae continues. “What I’ve come to learn is that all of those experiences were necessary so that I could come back to myself renewed. What I have found is that the greatest love affair you have is, truly, with yourself. You can’t lose yourself in people and you can’t lose yourself in things outside of who you are.”

Likewise, roses are red, tears are blue is a calmer entry-point than Fountain Baby—a lesson learned personified into seven electric R&B tracks. “THUG” is a prayer and a rumination; “sweeeet” is growth and Amaarae’s extension and expression of self. She wrote the latter on a long car ride and recorded it while she was in the studio waiting for somebody to send her stems for another song. roses are red was focused on more from-the-chest freestyles, as opposed to the concentrated, songwriting boot camp-type of effort—passing melodies and words between her and her producers, trimming the fat and adding entire sections—of Fountain Baby.

“What I really love about the records that I make is that they really do go through an intense songwriting process,” Amaarae says. “I was much more chill about not revising lyrics as much and allowing things to be more stream of consciousness.” She made “jehovah witness” in a random Los Angeles Airbnb because a friend of hers was hosting a recording camp, considering it a great example of how she’s able to use her sound-engineering and writing skills interchangeably better at home than in the studio. “I pulled up and no one knew how to engineer except me,” Amaarae laughs. “I was in a room full of producers and no one knew how to engineer.”

With every project, the pressure to succeed becomes even more intense for Amaarae. When she put out The Angel You Don’t Know, she wasn’t very well-known—but the people that did know her and the fanbase she’d built already were questioning whether or not she could ever top such a cohesive, out-of-the-gate masterwork. “And then, going into Fountain Baby, I felt the pressure to not only top The Angel You Don’t Know but to truly evolve my sound,” Amaarae says. “As much as I had leard a lot during the Angel You Don’t Know process, a lot of what we were doing on Fountain Baby was trial-and-error. That’s why it took us three years. But what was great about those three years is that myself and the boys I work with gained so much knowledge and so much skill and truly learned how to execute our ideas. When it came to making [roses are red, tears are blue], we knew exactly what to do—because we’ve put in that 10,000 hours. But, at the same time, there’s a pressure even more so now, with Fountain Baby being so critically acclaimed, to truly create a real masterpiece and to top that again. I’m not gonna lie, it’s a lot of pressure. I’m excited, but I’m also a little scared.”

She and her collaborators work faster now, and they have relationships with arrangers, instrumentalists and auxiliary producers all across the world—all of whom are just one call away. “THUG” and “wanted” are the best examples of this, as they are rid of the guesswork that defined the Fountain Baby sessions. “It’s like, ‘Oh, we want it to sound like this. All right, this is how we do that,’” Amaarae says. “There’s just not as much guessing or as much feeling around in the dark until we figure it out.” While The Angel You Don’t Know and Fountain Baby excel because of the coterie of brilliance Amaarae is locked in with, she sometimes prefers to sit by herself in the engineering chair when recording—if only because she can sense “a difference in my expression when I get to flow freely and I’m in the driver’s seat.” “I can stop and think through this bar, I can just do a quick freestyle,” she furthers. “I can just do a quick melody and then stop and come back again. Also, being able to create how I want my vocals to sound by myself, it’s a fun process for me—and a creative process as well.” Fountain Baby put Amaarae on a course toward pop stardom as a performer and a thinker, and roses are red, tears are blue is the redux that flaunts her multi-faceted prowess behind the boards. Across the seven new songs, she wanted to capture a more relaxed, freer sense of herself. Fountain Baby flourishes because of its structure, something roses are red doesn’t embrace nearly as affectionately—and intentionally so.

“Fountain Baby was such a labor of love that, when it came to roses are red, I was like, ‘You know what? I actually don’t want to care as much,’” Amaarae adds. “When I say I don’t want to care as much, it’s not that I don’t want to put as much energy and time into the music. I don’t want to be focused on ‘I have to execute this perfect thing.’ [I want to] let things be imperfect, let the delivery be imperfect, let the writing be imperfect.” But those imperfections won’t carry over into Amaarae’s next album, as she wants to outdo Fountain Baby a thousand times over. “When we go back in the studio, it’s not going to be any joking around,” she says, shifting gears back to a more confident energy. “Everyone’s going to have to bring their best selves and we’re going to have to transcend all of the greatest albums that we’ve heard and have always wanted to make. It will be more disciplined and we’ll study harder and we’ll work harder and we’ll push ourselves harder. At that point, it’s fuck Fountain Baby.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.