Until the discovery of the intergalactic star, it was thought that all stars had to belong to a galaxy, gravitationally bound to a single place. Sometimes called rogue stars, these traveling stars disprove what we thought were the laws of the universe. We still don’t understand why they exist or how they arise, but nonetheless, they are free. Typically, they are found alone.

“When you spend a lot of time on your own,” Ayra Starr describes, “you start to deconstruct everything you've been told to be. You start to find out what you really think, what you really want, what you really are and what you really want to be.”

When we speak, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter and global superstar is coming up on a year of living on her own for the first time in her life. First came a 3-month stint in Cape Town, South Africa, shooting her role in the upcoming film “Children of Blood and Bone.” Then, last fall, Ayra moved into her own apartment in New York City. Raised in a tight-knit Nigerian family with four siblings who have frequently worked with her in one capacity or another, the time since has brought the most solitude she’s ever experienced.

“At the beginning, I was loving it, like yes, I'm in my big girl apartment, nobody can tell me what to do, period!” Ayra laughs. Then the homesickness started to set in; she started missing the small things, like a helping hand around the house or the taste of her mother’s cooking. She made it through her first New York winter, the coldest and snowiest in the city in over a decade, and eventually, she found she had settled in. She got to know her local community and befriended the barista at her favorite coffee shop. She had her fair share of New York nights out, staying out til the early hours of morning even during the winter. With time, she found the rhythm of her independence, and in that quiet rhythm she started to get closer and closer to herself.

Now, as she awaits the release of her third album Starrgirl, she’s falling back on her routine to help ease the anticipatory jitters. Unlike past album cycles where she’s been recording up until the last minute or actively touring during a release, Starrgirl is finished; there have already been rounds of rewrites, rerecords, final edits and tweaks. “Now there’s nothing else to do but wait,” she says. But Ayra Starr is not used to having time on her hands.

Raised between Benin and Nigeria, Ayra sang with her family and in the church choir and competed in talent competitions as a child. Knowing education came first in her family, she started college at 14 and finished her BA in international relations and political science by the time she was 18; by then, she was already recording her self-titled first EP with legendary Nigerian producer Don Jazzy. In 2021 came her debut album, 19 and Dangerous, and in 2022, she released the single “Rush,” which cemented her status as an international crossover artist and has garnered nearly a billion streams.

She spent her late teens and early twenties becoming one of the global faces of Afrobeats, becoming the first Nigerian woman to debut on the Billboard 200 and the first Nigerian woman to be nominated for Best African Music Performance at the Grammy’s. The breakneck pace ofher rise was so all-consuming that, when she released her sophomore album, 2024’s The Year I Turned 21, she noted that the project marked her first time truly having enough of her own life experience outside of work to write from.

Ayra spent the first half of 2025 joining Coldplay for their Music of the Spheres World Tour as a supporting act. The experience of performing for tens of thousands of people on tour was profound, but it made her start to feel distant from herself — “like I was watching myself, my life from the outside.” She decided to do away with her old obsession “with being an album artist,” and while she traveled the world, she started to record for “the sake of making music” again. Taking the pressure off of herself proved effective, spawning a blazing run of singles including “Hot Body,” “Gimme Dat” with WizKid, and “Who’s Dat Girl” with Rema.

She reflects on a particularly valuable lesson from touring with Coldplay. “What I grew up thinking that performing was — it's about you as the artist, it's about you being on stage, these people coming to see you. I love being on stage and I love people singing my songs back to me, but being a supporting act made me understand that every night you're literally sacrificing yourself for these people that came to see you. It's not about you. It’s about them.”

“It's about how they lived that night,” she continues. “It's about if you touched lives, it's about if you made somebody smile or somebody feel better. That's what you're doing, that's your job.”

After the tour and her first major film set came her era of true independence. “Something about moving to New York took me from the outside point of view and put me back into my life,” she remembers. “And at that moment, I knew I was making an album. Not just because my label wanted me to make an album, or not just because everybody's expecting an album. I knew that, I’m making an album now because I can hear my voice for the first time in a long time.”

Ayra describes Starrgirl as an album born from “understanding myself and accepting being misunderstood, accepting myself for the multitude of experiences and personalities that I am.” The variety of the sounds on the project reflects her own eclectic, wide-ranging taste, from passionate ballads to dance tracks to Afrobeats to R&B to pop. Her voice is as robust as ever, and songs like “Heaven Baby” with Zayn Malik give her room to sing — “sometimes I just want to really sing!”

Collaborations with the likes of Leon Thomas and kwn reflect her organic taste and mutual admirers as well. “I'm a big fan of everybody on this album,” she explains. “It's not just business, it’s people that I actually genuinely love and listen to every morning, every night. I'm in everybody's DMs, asking for my verse — and they love my music too.”

She gets giddy recalling one collaboration that took place in person; “MS PAPER” with French-Congolese artist Theodora. “It was one of my favorite sessions ever, because the AC was not working in the studio. We’re recording a high tempo song, we're drinking and jumping around, everything and everybody is sweating. After we finished making the song, we played it like five times back to back and everybody was so delirious. It was amazing.”

It is this kind of mischievous, infectious energy that Ayra brings to her cover shoot for 66Greene, demanding that the crew all take a shot with her before beginning. This is Ayra the diva, the brash, sexy, impossibly confident and funny girl who makes you want to dance. But she balances this energy with a careful, mature diligence towards every aspect of her work; between joking and laughing with everyone on set, she adjusts her poses in real time as she watches photos come in on an iPad. When she likes something, she shimmies and compliments; when she doesn’t, she puts her foot down gently but firmly. She delights in unexpected styling choices and strange lighting. Her favorite shots are the ones that surprise her; “I don't like when people know what I'm going to do next.” This is Ayra the star, and she’s gone intergalactic.

“I’ve learned so much,” she says when we speak a few days later. “I'm getting the hang of how to balance myself, not just being on autopilot and going back to back to back.” She has a new understanding now, she describes, of how her body and brain function, and what she needs to take care of herself. “I'm excited to tour again with this new mindset I have, I'm so excited to be on stage again. I miss it so much.”

The suspense before a release is something Ayra never quite gets used to, but she’s come to realize that’s okay. “My attachment for the music is growing the more years I do this, so I don’t think it gets easier,” she says. “But I love it.”

“I feel like I have a lot more to do.”