Amaarae received great acclaim for her debut album, The Angel You Don’t Know, published in 2020. On TikTok, the Song “Sad Girlz Luv Money” by Moliy became popular. The song was remixed with a feature from Kali Uchis and peaked globally in 2021. The album was labeled “Best New Music” by Pitchfork and ranked the 19th best album of 2020.

She released her long-anticipated second album Fountain Baby on June 9, 2023, to excellent reviews.

Biography

Early Life

Ama Serwah Genfi aka Amaarae (born July 4, 1994). She was born in the Bronx, New York, to Ama Bawuah and Kwadwo Boateng Genfi and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and Accra, Ghana. She is the elder of two siblings.

Amaarae wrote her first song when she was 13 years old. During her adolescence, she adored watching music videos and recalls watching the music video for Kelis’ song “Young, Fresh n’ New” as one of her most vivid recollections. Kelis’ distinct expression served as an inspiration for her.

She began making mixtapes in high school. She started an internship at a recording studio when she was 17. She received voice instruction and polished her songwriting skills while studying English literature at a postsecondary institution. In June 2017, she returned to Ghana.

Education

Amaarae studied English literature at a university in the United Kingdom.

Career

In 2017, Amaarae released her debut album Passionfruit Summers. The song “Fluid” is on the album and is accompanied by a music video.

Amaarae was selected as one of Apple Music Africa’s Favourite New Artists in April 2018. Later that year became an Apple Music Beats 1 featured artist for her debut project Passionfruit Summers, which she released on November 30, 2017, through her independent record label, Golden Child LLC.

In November 2018, she performed at ART X Lagos, a Nigerian art fair, alongside Teni, Boj of DRB LasGidi, and Odunsi. Amaarae has also been recognized for her sense of style and fashion.

In 2018, she was featured in Vogue Online in an article on four women with buzz haircuts from around the world, and she was named one of Vogue Online’s Top 100 Style Influencers of 2018. She was nominated for Artist of the Year at Ghana’s Glitz Style Awards. She has also supported the Ghanaian fashion label Free The Youth.

Amaarae was picked to perform alongside La Meme Gang (Nxwrth, RJZ, KwakuBS, Darkovibes, Kiddblack, and $pacely) and rapper Kwesi Arthur at the first Boiler Room event in Accra on March 23, 2019.

Since then, Amaarae has worked with Stonebwoy, Kojey Radical, M3NSA, Santi, Blaqbonez, Buju, Odunsi, and B4bonah. Wande Coal, a Nigerian singer-songwriter, collaborated with her in 2019.

Amaarae’s debut album, The Angel You Don’t Know, was released on November 12, 2020. Pitchfork’s Owen Myers described it as “crackles with innovation, a pacesetter at a time when industry bigwigs are waking up to the long-held truth that Africa is setting the global tempo for pop music.”

Amaarae, with Black Sherif, Stonebwoy, and Smallgod, met Kendrick Lamar in May 2022 during his visit to Ghana and held a private listening party in Accra for his new album, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers.

Interscope Records released her sophomore album Fountain Baby on June 9, 2023. The statement also revealed that she was the first Ghanaian to appear on NPR Tiny Desk.

Amaarae Fountain Baby (Album Review)

Amaarae appears to be quite pricey these days. Not necessarily in a material sense, however vintage Impalas, box-fresh Mowalolas, and abundant Dior drip are mentioned. Her voice is especially rich, and her music is lavishly instrumented: violins and cellos, a Japanese koto, airy harps, West African dounoun and kora, steel pan drums, and a commanding horn section.

It flows, saunters, and brags, all while Amaarae’s beautiful soprano lilts to the gods. The fountain in question is pussy, but it’s also much more than that. Fountain Baby is the interesting story of a woman who desires the world but is also knowledgeable enough to recognize that serpents follow grandeur.

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.

Amaarae is simply having too much fun before she confronts the evil side of wealth. Fountain Baby’s track “Co-Star,” produced by KZ DidIt and Kyu Steed, adorns the rhythmic rhythm with crystalline synths and Amaarae’s lighthearted needling about astrological signs, halfway between a meme (“Them Libra bitches horrible”) and a satirical diary of her dating life.

By the second song, the dreamy baile funk-inspired daydream “Angels in Tibet,” she’s singing “I want to fuck a puddle” with a diaphanous bliss, as if 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 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 million me/I wanna ménage with the blocky 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 honour.”

On “Sociopathic Dance Queen,” a candy pop gem about a doomed hookup at a lousy 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 relaxed 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 nickname—no one’s more aware of the irony that Amaarae herself, as she looks to a higher power for a sign she won’t heed. “Shawty says she loves me like she loves 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.

Discography

EP

2017: Passionfruit Summers

Albums

2020: The Angel You Don’t Know

2023: Fountain Baby 

Selected Singles

2019: Spend Some Time (featuring Wande Coal)

2020: Leave Me Alone

2021: Sad Girlz Luv Money (with Moliy featuring Kali Uchis)

2023: Reckless & Sweet

2023: Fountain Baby

2023: Co-Star

Personal Life

Physically invading, Amaarae enjoys a spectacular appearance with her tinted glasses of various colors, which differs from her plain glasses.

Amaarae Relationship

Amaarae is rumored to be in a secret relationship that she desires to keep quiet.

While this is still a rumor with no credible source to back it up, we must assume that Amaarae is still single and not in any public dating relationship.

Amaarae Faults Grammy Organizers For Creating African Category

Amaarae criticized the Recording Academy, the Grammy Awards‘ organizers, this month for lumping all African music styles into one category at the award event.

In a recent interview with Metro TV last month June, Amaarae described the Grammys’ decision to lump all African musical genres into a single category as “reductive.”

She said: “The idea of an African category [at the Grammys] is excellent in practice, but I think it is reductive. There are way too many categories to just place under an umbrella of African music.

“Take a song like ‘Sad Girlz’, ‘Calm Down,’ or ‘Calm Down’ or ‘Last Last’; these are all songs that didn’t just do well in Africa but did well globally and had humongous global impacts. So, to me, they are popular records.

“So, I feel like a record like [Rema’s] ‘Calm Down’ with the remix with Selena Gomez, that should be able to compete in pop categories [at the Grammys]. I feel like [Burna Boy’s] ‘Last Last’ should be able to compete in hip-hop, RnB, or pop categories and not be relegated to just the African category because that’s reductive of the works that [African] artists have done to break boundaries.”

Age

She is 29 years of age. Born on July 4, 1994.

Social Media

Follow Amaarae on all her social media platforms:

Instagram

Facebook

Twitter 

Net Worth

Amaarae is a Ghanaian-American singer-songwriter and one of the fast-rising female Ghanaian artists with an estimated net worth of $400,000. She is noted for her combination of Pop, R&B, Afrobeat, and Alté music and her flexible gender and sexuality expression. She launched her debut EP, Passionfruit Summers, in 2017 after collaborating with local artists and releasing a few non-album songs.

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