Amara-Fe – SHIFT (Album Review)

In today’s review on Music Review World, we shall introduce a brand-new artist to the ethos: Amara-Fe. In technical terms, she’s been around in the industry with connections, but have not necessarily been put in the forefront as a solo artist with a spotlight. Of course, with this review, we will change all of that with highlighting her stardom, and analysing her artistry.

Coming from a place called ‘Mission’ in the United States, she is influenced by a variety of people. The core basis seems to be her family members, especially their musical prowess exemplified by her grandmother having songwriting credits for Minnie Riperton and her uncles Eugene & Rene jamming in Tulsa, Oklahoma. However, it has come to my attention that…. some of this information may not necessarily be credible. It is stated on Amara-Fe’s biography write-up that she is from Mission, Texas, but on Instagram, it states that she is in Dallas, Texas. Perhaps her talent has given her some sort of spatial superposition.

In some wonderful fusion of neural networks, information paradox and music, she too, desires to take the virtual stage with her debut album titled ‘Reborn’, released on August 9th 2025. This release aims to be a testament to a projection of an artist with unwavering commitment in terms of artistically converting experiences and observations into soulful melodies. I have to wonder, is this truly a real person?

The album, ‘SHIFT’ is here.

The first track, ‘Eyes on Me’, gives you pretty much a good introduction of what the album will consist of. Warning, some foreshadowing ahead- repetition. It is your standard pop track filled with robotic sass, taking strides from artists like Taylor Swift in 2014, Meghan Trainor around the same era, perhaps with a little bit of Iggy Azalea mixed in. It is extremely generic, with no real musical quirk or uniqueness to it. It is meant for the commercial ear, to fulfil a simple aim of ‘music’s here to give you a ‘vibe’.’ It’s well-mastered, but I think it’s quite hard to make a non-organic track badly mastered, don’t you think?

The tracks afterwards follow the exact same compositional format. Overly zealous synth chops with percussive syncopation that would definitely appeal someone who’s used to Ariana Grande’s artistry without any form of vocal distinctiveness. It’s just here to be your run-of-the-mill pop music. At some point, even if the ‘artist’ or really prompt generator behind the track wants the general public to be on board, they’ll (and they are) doing a pretty good job rehashing specific pop tracks from the years 2014 to 2018 specifically to the uncritical ear. Boisterous, annoying, upbeat, with a ‘necessary’ urban kick with one measure to seem cool to the audience, how much better can this be?

I’m not joking when I say the tracks on this release are utterly similar. Even different segments of a classical composition have more variation than this. By the fifth track, ‘Ride for Me’, there’s really no new compositional technique for me to rave about. It’s a feminized version of Macklemore’s one-hit wonder. By the sixth track, ‘Whole vibe’, maybe it changes a little bit from the emotional tone of the first few stanzas, but it turns into the same K-Pop Demon Hunters format it adopts. Dare I say, almost… annoying.

If you want some sort of variation, perhaps the seventh track ‘Call me Out’ may give it to you. It has an acoustic, slightly Latin-esque and dynamic vibe to it, with the same ostentatious vocals. I’ll spare you, the reader, the rigour of having to wax lyrical consistently for all tracks within this release. It is extremely flat and has no real charm to it. It’s commercial. It’s meant for an American ‘Target’ ad. I don’t know how else I could make it clearer to you. Potentially, I think this whole work was generated with AI. I know the ‘artist’ (rather, ‘artist manager’) behind this record may dispute this claim but I will not back down from this claim unless proof is given without manipulation. The songs are too generic and repetitive to be real.

The proof I have for this is the fact that when you look at the songwriters for this album, a lot of the tracks are ascribed to the titular ‘Amara-Fe’, and another individual named… possibly the owner of the ‘record label’, named ‘KINGBYDESIGN’.

When you look up this record label, it leads you to writing credits to another ‘artist’,

‘Vanessa Marie King’, another individual who also possibly does not exist. One AI-generated artist to cater to the Pop and Black market, and another AI-generated artist to cater to the Hispanic market. Both bearing ‘female’ identities, carved and generated by a singular man, without declaring that any of these pieces of music are AI-generated to the general public.

Beyond the lacklustre music within the release that this review had to cover, isn’t it generally suspicious that a man is making use of female identities in the form of ‘artists’ and doing a horrible job at that? If one had AI to supplement the composition of music, why can’t it be as superior as the music that have gained the ‘Outstanding’ or the ‘Excellent’ rating on Music Review World? Why does it have to sound extremely commercial, monotonous and severely lacking in motivic variation? There is a way to make decent music with AI, and this is not an example of it.

And with that, I hope ‘Amara-Fe’ takes some pointers for improvement beyond the release of ‘Shift’, to make music that isn’t so generic sounding and void of character. Perhaps, it is best to add a bit of humanization to an algorithm- or use the algorithm to compose, like Iannis Xenakis. If you have a soft spot for tracks that tend to be on the top 40 playlist of the average millennial’s Spotify rotation, this album is definitely for you.

SCORE/Good: ‘Shift’ by Amara-Fe is a wonderful album that lacks motivic variation, best for those who really enjoy the popular music trends characterizing the top 40 charts within the years of 2013 to 2018. If you missed the schtick that Meghan Trainor used to ride to fame, this album is filled with the best ‘I told you so’ sassiness best reserved for the backing track of a rom-com film. It definitely has general appeal, and could do well with some humanization.

You can follow Amara Fe on Instagram and Facebook.