The first time Amaarae picked up the microphone, she was trying to be a rapper, not a singer. She pursued that calling for a few years, collaborating with a producer cousin who eventually had to deliver a hard truth: While the Ghanaian American musician wasn’t that good as a rapper, her lilting voice — and its Auto-Tune-like birdsong — could probably make her lyrics shine as songs.

“He was basically like, ‘You suck in this one way, but here’s another way you might not suck. So give it a try and see how it goes,’” she recalls.

That familial advice undersold what would come next: The singer-songwriter has spent the last several years building buzz with an au courant amalgam of pop music that spans continents, reaching an apotheosis with last year’s well-received “Fountain Baby.”

Amaarae’s soprano pitter-patters across her sophomore album, finding pockets of air over percolating productions that draw on diasporic grooves, scintillating synthesizers and bubbling bass lines. Like many artists her age, the 29-year-old cannot be pigeonholed by genre, like when gentle guitar ballad “Sex, Violence, Suicide” erupts into a punk kiss-off reminiscent of the early-aughts New York scene.

Amaarae was born in the Bronx but raised between Atlanta; Mount Olive, N.J.; and Accra, Ghana. Her influences span her erstwhile hometowns, where she was often in the right place at the right time. Amaarae’s years in Atlanta corresponded with a wave of Southern rap instigated by Gucci Mane and T.I., while her time in the Jersey suburbs exposed her to both pop-punks My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy and pop star Britney Spears’s influential “Blackout” record. By the time she moved to Africa, the continent’s musical renaissance was underway, with Afrobeats and alté sounds coming into focus.

While she calls Spears a musical genius, Amaarae saves higher praise for singer Kelis, whose fearless, iconoclastic approach to music and beyond continues to serve as a guiding light.

“What spoke to me [about Kelis] was everything, from her style, to the color of her hair, to the timbre of her voice, to the heavy rock influences in her music,” Amaarae explains. “Kelis is the quintessential alternative Black girl. We’re all modeled after Kelis.”

“Fountain Baby” song “Princess Going Digital” sounds like Amaarae’s take on a turn-of-the-millennium Kelis track, and several moments on the album recall that singer’s chief producers, the Neptunes. “Counterfeit” is built on a sample of the Neptunes-produced Clipse favorite “Wamp Wamp,” in which Amaarae imagines what the original’s “masculine gangsta energy” would sound like if sung by Gwen Stefani. Throughout the album, Amaarae delivers the female gaze of sex and sensuality, with lyrics focused on bodies in motion and contact and full of flexes in the streets and the sheets.

“Sensuality and the rawness but also the passion of sex is something that’s human nature, and I think that I have my own unique way of expressing that,” she says. “There’s a freedom to that. When I’ve come into contact with people that listen to my music, they feel that freedom gives them a license to express themselves.”

The type of sexual expression Amaarae embraces in her music and fosters in her audience is increasingly under attack, with reactionaries focused on issues of sex and gender in both the United States and Ghana, where parliament passed a repressive anti-LGBTQ+ law last month.

“You can’t police human experience,” Amaarae says. “It’s tough now, the way that the world is trying to approach it. In general, it seems very shortsighted, and I don’t understand why.”

March 27 at 8 p.m. at Fillmore Silver Spring, 8656 Colesville Rd., Silver Spring. fillmoresilverspring.com. $40.