Starrgirl, Ayra Starr‘s third full-length studio album, tops this week’s new music poll.
Listeners voted in a poll published Friday (Aug. 14) on Billboard, choosing the Nigerian Afropop star’s latest release as their favorite new music.
Starrgirl rose above a number of new releases this week — from music acts including KATSEYE, Phoebe Bridgers, Troye Sivan, Becky G and more. At the poll’s closing time on Sunday, Starr’s new LP came out on top with more than 87% of the vote.
Starrgirl, the follow-up to the singer’s The Year I Turned 21 album (released in 2024), is a collection of 16 tracks, including recent single “Tornado” and last year’s Grammy-nominated Wizkid collab, “Gimme Dat” — plus features with names like Zayn, Rema, Leon Thomas and Danny Ocean. Starr expanded her sound on the project, bringing in more dance and R&B notes.
“I’m so proud of the woman I’ve allowed myself to become through the making of this album and every version of me that had to exist to get here,” Starr wrote on Instagram on release week.
In an interview with Variety, the singer said moving to New York inspired the new music: “I feel like I was a different person in New York than I was in any part of the world, and I just liked who I was,” she said, explaining that as a woman in her 20s, she was just “acting my age. I’m living my age. I just liked experiencing life, and it wasn’t just about work, work, work. It was about enjoying all the work I’ve done and just allowing myself to be, you know? And seeing myself from the lens of complete, and ‘I am,’ instead of ‘I have to be.’”
“And that’s what Starrgirl is,” she said. “It’s not really an alter ego, but it’s a part of me that already is complete, does not have to perform, does not have to be. Because being a Black girl and an African girl, we grew up with, ‘You have to be this.’ There’s a certain type of anxiety that is deep, layers, layers, layers, layers within you, that you just feel like you have to unlearn. But when you remove yourself from that and go deep, deep you start to understand that you don’t need to be anything other than what you already are.”
Trailing behind Starrgirl on Billboard‘s poll this week are KATSEYE’s “WILD,” Phoebe Bridgers’ Lost Weekend and Troye Sivan’s “She’s the Best.”
See the final results of this week’s poll below.
