Amaarae’s BLACK STAR bursts open with enough bombast to fill a festival tent, toggling between sweaty club bangers and surprising moments of organic tenderness. Much more than a straight set of floor-fillers, this is a vision of modern pop grounded in Ghanaian rhythms and Afro-diasporic grooves.

An impressive synthesis of worlds, BLACK STAR is a project with one foot in the West’s EDM festival culture, and the other firmly in African soil, with a fusion that feels cohesive, natural, and big. Party themes of crushes, drugs, and intoxication dominate, all delivered with far too much personality to feel generic. Fineshyt rides a stone-cold classic house synth over a blistering tempo with euphoric energy, whilst the collaboration with PinkPantheress Kiss Me Thru The Phone pt2 blends their voices so seamlessly it’s hard to tell them apart. Amaarae channels Cardi B’s abrasiveness on one track, and slides into a delicate, whispered intimacy on the next with a gift for flexibility and collaboration.

Even when the low end thumps like a cannon, there’s a sense of space, leaving Amaarae’s vocals surrounded by air and clarity instead of cluttering the treble range, making the record far more listenable than many of its EDM contemporaries. The chunky, instantly recognisable synth lines of Western house music sit alongside sun-drenched acoustic guitar strums and African percussion sounding like natural bedfellows, meeting in a way that feels seamless and celebratory. The consistent silliness throughout the record feels like a deliberate reminder that reckless fun and fleeting tenderness can both be a part of the same sweaty night out.

Where so many big-room dance records fill every frequency with clattering percussion, BLACK STAR often strips back completely leaving huge amounts of space for Amaarae’s voice. Her vocals shift from abrasive rapping to feather-light intimacy with a dynamic confidence, stretching in different directions depending on the track. The record comes straight out the gate with enormous, bass-heavy bangers tailor-made for a festival stage, but threads in moments of weightlessness with no drums at all, where her voice floats over airy synths and sunlit guitar lines. Sweaty release one moment, reflective tenderness the next.

BLACK STAR is a collection of massive, crowd-moving bangers, but it never feels one-dimensional. The title itself nods to the black star on Ghana’s flag with the cover framing Amaarae as the same symbol. In her hands, festival EDM and Ghanian rhythms aren’t opposites but two traditions designed to make you move and keep your body in motion. The fusion is seamless, both proudly Ghanian and effortlessly mass appeal. The sound of that point where cultures converge, with two traditions sitting on top of one another perfectly, as chunky Western festival drops and basslines are matched by African guitars and percussive grooves with a lived-in fluency. A triumph of sound without borders.