Some time last year, Amaarae and her creative director, Briana, were driving through Accra, chewing over the ascendant singer’s next move. “In Ghana, there are a lot of religious posters,” remembers the musician of their journey, “huge posters, promoting churches, promoting God – whatever.” The billboards are commonplace in the artist’s home nation, she says when we meet via video-call. “There’s this one huge poster on the highway that says ‘REPENT! JESUS IS COMING SOON.’” With all the instinct of a cartoon double act – a ‘you thinking what I’m thinking?’ moment – the pair turned to one another and immediately began hatching a plan to create a deity-style billboard for the star 7,000 miles away, in the Colorado desert.
By April, what had once been a pipe dream had become a grandiose roadside vision of pop in 2023: resplendent in robes and lacquered with the gloss of a resin statuette, a gargantuan Amaarae peered down over IS COMING SOON!” it read. Amaarae was set to perform at Coachella to promote her upcoming second album, and the decision to debut that particular message on the road to the festival – whose line-up featured more than a hundred of Amaarae’s contemporaries – was no accident. “It was a message to other artists to put out better music,” she says with a laugh.
