Have you seen the new Amaarae website?

Well you should. As part of the roll out for her new single Like It, Amaarae announced that she was launching a new dedicated website. A marvel to behold, the website leans heavily on nostalgia and our current obsession with it to create a cornucopia of easter egg delights. From the landing page that loads just like an early Windows green text boot screen, to the sepia tones of the video page, which gives you the sensation of discovering a treasure trove of VCR’s. There is even a vintage music player app on the website that draws heavily from the vintage Amp player skins that were popular in 2005. It is so carefully curated that if you didn’t know Amaarae you could mistake it for someone else.

This kind of nostalgia is something that a few people have experimented with (i.e Lady Donli’s retro video game for her single Games), but very few African artists have come as close as Amaarae to creating a near perfect time capsule of all the things in the 80’s and 90’s that made our childhoods special.

Apart from its stellar design, a few things stand out on her new website. The music video for the song she is currently promoting with the website and its paraphenalia is very deliberate about how it bends gender fluidity and how it investigates the barriers that exist to keep them at bay. The site also presents all of her body of work in a way that is visually exciting and curiosity inducing, and delivers the necessary pay off for its excellent design. Amaa collaborated with a number of exciting Ghanaian visual artists and creator to make the website and the video that it is currently promoting. It is hard not to stan for a creator who is so intentional with how she manipulates media to reach her audience.

Watch the video for Like It here:

Edwin Okolo

Edwin Okolo is an author and journalist who has worked with YNaija, TheNativemag and the Naked Convos.