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Amaarae plays the role of a material girl in her music.
So this time I was like, All right, Im going to do everything myself.
Shes also leaning more pop this time.
so that createFountain Baby, she became an obsessive pop scholar.
Pop earworm Sociopathic Dance Queen has a magnetic dance-floor insistency reminiscent of Robyns Honey.
Here, Amaarae breaks down all the influences that shaped her new album.
Britney Spears,Blackout
The first time I heardBlackoutwas when I was 14.
Ill literally never forget it.
I fucked withGimme Morebut had never heard the album all the way through.
The way this house party of teens was dancing I have never seen anything like that.
From Britney, I learned about two things one is intentionality with production choices.
For me, that is really clear onBlackout.
I really wanted to inject that into my music.
The second thing I learned from Britney was vocal tone her control and texture.
Britney has one of the most interesting textures in the world.
I learned from Michael and Janet Jackson in that regard, too.
I was falling in and out of love and I was scared out of my mind.
But I think not denying those feelings is what led me to a lot of the songs onFountain Baby.
The whole second verse of Reckless & Sweet is a favorite.
There is a very slight undertone of raspiness to my voice and thats definitely from Anthony Kiedis.
As for the high-pitched pierce, thats Young Thug.
But that was their sole job.
And whoever was doing it was the best.
Same thing with music.
And I just want us to go back to that.
With this album, I wanted to take listeners back to dancing to interesting beats in the club.
For the first two bars of the song, Ando is playing this tune on the kora.
Instead of sampling the record, I was like, All right, cool.
What if we had a kora player come in?
And she played the undertone of the original song.
Then we had a Japanese singer, Crystal Kay, come in and play the top line.
I was like, Crystal, I want you just to sing this top line.
So in Wasted Eyes shes singing in Japanese, Time to play or not to play.
What am I going to choose: play, play, play.
That was how we learned to resample.
It was the most challenging record to make.
As far as production, we really pushed ourselves.
Dream Wife,So When You Gonna …
They embody this all-girl group energy I really like.
I ended up loving them so much Iinterviewed themfor a radio show with NTS.
Dream Wife DMed me about potentially collaborating, and I jumped at the chance.
They play guitar on the song Sex, Violence, Suicide.
I loved how expansive his sound was and how daring he was in sending me interesting music.
Id never heard him do any rock-leaning sounds before.
I loved how willing he was to push himself in new ways.
