Ayra Starr's ‘StarrGirl’ Is the Perfect Embodiment of Contemporary African Pop

There is a very high chance that, upon clicking play on StarrGirl, the third studio album by Nigerian Afro-pop princess Ayra Starr, you would be unable to accurately guess the kind of sonic experience you’re about to embark on. There’s also a chance that the sounds that will flood your ears will feel at once strange and entirely unlike anything you’ve heard from Ayra before. Still though, there’s an even higher chance that you will like it.

StarrGirl, released today, August 14, is Ayra’s most audacious and narratively compelling project yet. It is suffused with esoteric influences, littered with genres from Congolese bouyon to House and Afro-pop, and deliciously self-assured. It is free of fillers and trimmed to fit a beguiling sonic frame. There’s a sense, listening to StarrGirl, that Ayra has been listening more to herself and has been interrogating what she is hearing. She isn’t merely serving up what she observes about life, love, and ambition; she has allowed herself to live through these observations and process them with wiser, more intelligent eyes.

In this project, the 24-year-old dissects identity, love, self possession, fame and pressure - yet she isn’t drowned by the matted composition of these ideas. It’s what makes this album reflective of her vast and fascinating pool of interests — one she no doubt has picked up by leaving her comfort zone and throwing herself off the ledge of the familiar. Ayra has never been afraid of grounding herself in her Nigerianness, in spinning poetic lines from pidgin and English. 

While many have attempted to capture and articulate the future of the African sound, that is a sound now strongly infected and driven by globalist ideas, Ayra Starr has managed, quite effortlessly, to offer a perfect encapsulation of that. In this project, she maintains a firmly Nigerian context and uses that to enter international genres from soft rock to R&B. Her sound isn’t a simulation of what a cosmopolitan African sound might sound like, as much as it is an unedited delivery of her perspective as a young African person relating with the increasingly globalized world around her. How do you maintain and invite people towards your center, Ayra seems to ask, while keeping an eye out for the many wonderful elements within the vicinity of that center?

Without a doubt, StarrGirl is Ayra Starr's magnum opus. It is brilliantly finished, confidently experimental and at every turn, tells the story of a brilliant young artist coming fully into her own.

Here are OkayAfrica’s takeaways below:

Ayra Starr Has Turned Into A Truly Interesting Artist

For exactly 46 minutes, Ayra Starr is many things, but self-contradictory. In “Dangerous” she is confidently braggadocious, set the records straight as to who exactly she is (a bonafide hitmaker), how she perceives herself (an unimpeachable star) and how the people who love her most see her (as a beacon of inspiration and the source of their many conversations). Later in the album, she is all bleeding heart and unguarded feelings in “Heaven Baby” featuring certified crooner ZAYN. In between all of these, she is at different tempos of her emotions; focused on making money and keeping it in the bouyon heavy “Ms Paper” featuring French-Congolese superstar Theodora, and losing herself in the ecstasy of a perfect, blurry night out in the house/techno laced “Midnight In New York.” In spite of the vastness of her emotions and changes in tonalities both thematic and technical, Ayra is still completely herself. She isn’t a shapeshifting mascot embodying trendy concepts, she is simply multidimensional. A young woman who can spend the afternoon crying her heart out and the evening discovering the dizzying joys that her city’s nightlife holds. With Ayra, it’s really all about balance.

A Massive Stacks Of Hits

“Dangerous”. “Ms Paper”. “Midnight In New York”. “Dance”. “Heaven Baby”. These are some of the standout tracks in StarrGirl, not least for their excellent productions, which feature vocal layerings and diverse genres, but because they all bear the tellings of bonafide hits. Considered separately, each song lends Ayra a strong air of musical maturity, showcasing the breadth of her range, on vocal and literary level. These songs contend with timely and often lighthearted themes of love, self-defining, self-trust, the allure of the highlife, and the thrill of losing yourself in something strange and unexplainable. These tracks also cross borders, where “Dangerous” leans heavily into Afro-pop with a brilliantly selected assist from Terry Apala, a contemporary Nigerian Apala artist. “Dance” is pure house guided by Ayra’s effortless rap-sing that features heavily throughout this project. Whichever way you look at it, Ayra has set herself up for a hit making journey that will surely bear fruits.

Ayra Has Burnished Her Worldbuilding

Central to the heart of StarrGirl is excellent worldbuilding. While she rarely tells us where she is at a particular time, listeners are given enough clues to figure out her headspace at the time she made each record. With a recent move to New York, Ayra has been open with the sense of loneliness and chilling newness of being in a new city at the heart of a world much bigger than the one she came from. We get much of this throughout the project, not through her ruminations on them, but through the admirable fact that she has emerged from that period a completely different person. 

In this record, Ayra is free of burnish, her life, from what we can glean is bigger and filled with more surprising characters. We get a sense of the kind of parties she enjoys, the romantic settings she’s keen on and the sort of space where she might let her guard down. StarrGirl is rich in imagery and in that way, offers a full experience complete with a world of its own. One that, to say the least, is just simply exciting to be a part of.

The Future of African Sound

At a time when the Nigerian music industry is still hashing out its next regeneration, Ayra has served up a fantastic formula for making music that incorporates a wide variety of tastes without substituting her identity. In StarrGirl, Ayra is something of a curator, pairing genres that have been paired together before but doing so with disarming authenticity. Her interests and the genres she chooses she works in, one can tell, are sounds she has sat with for a long time. She has learned their contours and considered her ambitions and limitations within them. Her voice, which dazzles, stuns and surprises at different turns, has grown accustomed to the mutations required for this sort of project. If we are still looking for an archetype or signal for what the future and present of African Pop sounds like, please look to Ayra Starr. Look to StarrGirl.