Around halfway through the recording process for her second album, Fountain Baby, Amaarae remembers being in a writing camp at a studio in Accra, when one of her co-producers began playing a clattering Brazilian funk beat. “One of the other producers that was there had been reading this book on Tibetan spiritual practices, and had been telling us about it,” Amaarae says. “I remember he was high as a kite—on weed, by the way!—and then he hopped on the mic. And, I swear to God, his eyes started rolling back. He was doing these, like, Tibetan chants. And this is an African dude. So this is where it all just kind of gets a bit crazy…”
The result was “Angels in Tibet,” Fountain Baby’s exhilarating opener. Debuting last year to universal critical acclaim, it’s a dazzling showcase of the Ghanaian-American musician’s prodigious talents and her deliberately genre-bending, globe-trotting sound. You might hear snatches of a Japanese folk song one minute, and jangling punk rock guitars the next—but it’s all then filtered into sparkling, alté-inflected pop of the highest order, informed by Amaarae’s upbringing between Atlanta and Accra. (There’s also the thrilling carnality of her lyrics, all delivered in her signature feathery falsetto.) “I remember the producer started chanting, and it just changed the energy in the room,” she continues. “Then I hopped on the mic and just started to hum that first melody. It was a very spiritual experience that day, and I really tried to channel that spirit across the whole album.”
Now, she’s channeling that spirit every night: Amaarae is currently in the final stages of a European tour, before moving on to the U.S. next week. And to mark the moment, she decided to finally record a music video for “Angels in Tibet,” which has—not coincidentally—been popping off on TikTok recently. “A lot of fans have been asking for a video for a long time, so I figured, you know, it’s not gonna hurt—I might as well give it to them,” she says with a laugh. “It took a while, but we’re here, finally. And I think that’s what counts.”