Amaarae

• The Angel You Don't Know [Golden Child, 2020] B+
• Fountain Baby [Interscope, 2023] A-

Consumer Guide Reviews:

The Angel You Don't Know [Golden Child, 2020]
Born Ama Serwah Genfi to Ghanaian parents in the Bronx 28 years ago, based variously in a New Jersey suburb, Atlanta, London, and Accra, Amaarae has been a professional musician for over a decade. Making the most of a breathy soprano that mixes chants, trills, and murmurs into what comes down to her own style of rapping, she registers sex-positive rather than sex-obsessed because she makes a convincing show of calling her own shots, although exactly how that applies to the "Sad Girlz Love Money" capper is a trickier question. Sonic innocence meets verbal candor in a cutesy amalgam that would have been shocking just a decade ago. B+

Fountain Baby [Interscope, 2023]
OK, maybe she is sex-obsessed--she can afford it. For sure this is as unabashedly erotic and indeed pornographic an album as I can recall, which I say as a heterosexual male who responds more warmly to the varied vaginas she lusts after than I ever did to the panoply of oversized hip-hop dicks that have long since passed from my memory. Her portion of fame proud and earned, her voice simultaneously fragile and self-possessed, her star-time comforts and advantages acknowledged without vanity or apology, she doesn't so much boast about her crushes, trysts, and conquests as lay them out lubriciously or matter-of-factly as the cherished rewards of a lifestyle I wouldn't be surprised to learn she's exaggerating. From "Reckless and Sweet" to "Come Home to God," from "All My Love" to "Sociopathic Dance Queen," she appreciates what she's got without taking it for granted, and without assuming there are no more chapters to her story. A-