Ayra Starr drops Starrgirl album after surgery, NYC move
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- Ayra Starr underwent undisclosed "major surgery" two weeks before her album release, was back rehearsing within seven days with a bandage strapped across her stomach, and appeared on US breakfast TV show Today to promote the record.
- Starrgirl, Starr's third album and first under Roc Nation after a Lagos-to-New York move, features collaborations with Wizkid, Rema, One Direction's Zayn Malik, and rising R&B singer KWN.
- Starr became the first African woman to win best international act at the Mobo Awards, the first Nigerian woman to surpass one billion YouTube video views, and in 2024 the first Afrobeats artist to play Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage.
- The track Where Do We Go was inspired by a secretive relationship "stuck in a rut" she kept returning to; Starr said she ultimately chose music over the romance because "you keep accepting things lower than your standard."
- Ms Paper detours into Bouyon — a high-tempo Dominican genre — recorded almost by accident after a boozy dinner with French-Congolese star Theodora in a sweltering, broken-AC LA studio; live snippets have already gone viral.
- Starr faced criticism in Nigeria for "diluting her musical heritage" with a more global sound, and answered critics via her album cover pairing a gold club dress with a traditional gele headwrap — a look that's since inspired dozens of copycats.
- When Stevie Wonder phoned to congratulate her on a Grammy nomination, Starr goaded him into a zodiac-sign argument and told the Taurus legend that "Tauruses ain't crap."
Why it matters: Starr's pivot toward a more global sound — Bouyon on Ms Paper, electronic pulses on Where Do We Go — under Roc Nation's infrastructure tests whether the first African woman Mobo winner can scale internationally without losing her Nigerian fanbase, the very tension her new album cover (gele meets club gold) is designed to resolve. Live snippets of Ms Paper already going viral suggest she has a second global hit after Rush.
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