Cruelty

The transnational alté popstar's second full-length might just be the Album of the Year. Brought up between Atlanta and Accra, Amaarae (born Ama Serwah Genfi) wanted to reflect both of these worlds in her second full-length release.  The Angel You Don’t Know , her critically lauded 2020 debut, had established her as a rising star within the alté genre (a fusion of Afropop, hip hop and R&B), but with   Fountain Baby   she aimed to also encapsulate “the freedom of the vision that exists outside of this pocket”. Studying Britney, Janet and Stevie Nicks to create this boundary-pushing sophomore, Amaarae wanted “to shift the style of music that’s being played on the dance floor”. The results are musically and lyrically complex, talking about how the empowering effects of love often come at a cost, but that doesn’t mean   Fountain Baby   shouldn’t be lighting up every dance floor in the world. It feels like the whole world can be found within   Fountai...

'Love Profusion' is the most annoyingly normal song on Madonna's most innovative album. 2003's American Life is a startlingly original work of post-9/11 folktronica, Mirwais Ahmadzaï's stuttering vocal treatment and sparse electroclash textures melding guitars and synths to produce an aggressively left-field pop album. The lyrical concepts are some of Madonna's best, investigating the intersection of the personal, political and cultural in a world tarnished by the horrors of 9/11 and saturated with materialism. Interspersing critiques of a fame-hungry culture with love letters to Guy Ritchie (the marginally less awful of her two husbands), American Life rejects the stereotypes that 1980s 'Material Girl' Madonna had sought to cultivate, and aims to answer the question of what 'the American Dream' actually is these days. The fourth and final single, 'Love Profusion', advocates cutting out all the noise, and instead focusing on the on...