Somewhere between the coast of Ghana and the islands of the Philippines, a desert flower blooms. Her name is , and much like the name, she has learned to love the improbable places where beautiful things grow.
Her music is hard to hold in one hand. It moves between alternative sounds, soft rock, R&B, electronic, highlife, Afrobeats, stitched together by restless percussion topped with a voice built for big feeling. Anabel Rose is a singer, songwriter and performer from Accra, Ghana. Born to Ghanaian and Filipino parents, she blossomed in the tropics under the influence of highlife, Afrobeats and Azonto, guided too by the powerhouse vocals and deep tradition of emotional balladry.
She speaks to me from Berlin, where the European heatwave is sweeping through. On a hot evening when indoors felt hotter than out, we talk about who she is, the Anabel she wants the world to meet, the one who kept growing despite every obstacle in the way. It was a night that almost matched the conditions she has learned to bloom in. Some have met her music tucked in a Spotify Fresh Finds cover, a magazine spotlight, or a standout set at an Accra spot where only the coolest congregate.
Now consider this a reintroduction. With Anabel Rose we’re always dancing to the beat of her current life story, “From 2022 to 2026, the lessons I learned throughout it, that’s what I put into the EP,” she explains. “I was studying in LA, and I moved back to Ghana in 2022 after I graduated. I was low-key depressed, because I was thinking, I’m coming back to Ghana, what am I going to do? But I immediately got into music.”
In 2023, she announced herself with ‘’, a genre-bending, Afro-percussive single that danced through the dramatic overwhelm of a girl in her twenties. That’s her trick– she will make you move, then tell you the truth in the same breath. It recalls the sleight of hand André 3000 pulls on ‘Hey Ya’, the one where the crowd is dancing to a song that is quietly falling apart in its own hands.
Her discography feels like a peek into her diary; the struggles, the obstacles, the rants and venting, all stitched into songs that’ll make you dance. You watch her grow in real time, drifting through ephemeral situationships, dodging the realities that adulthood keeps demanding, until she arrives at her most recent project ‘How Do The Flowers Bloom?’.
And she tells us exactly how. “When I chose the title, I’d been in a headspace of figuring out the next step, navigating adulthood, and having to do that on the continent, especially as a creative,” she says. “So I used the flower metaphor. I’ve also have this recent obsession with desert roses, because they’re beautiful, but also because they need intense sunlight and very little water to grow. It’s a persevering plant.”
Her most recent battle is with choosing a creative career that feeds the soul but offers none of the security of the white collar life her parents might have expected of her. ‘Imperfect Daughters’, the sad, sappy ballad that opens the EP, tells that story “I intentionally started the project with ‘Imperfect Daughters’. It was one of those days where I was like, Chaley, am I doing the right thing?” It is a fear she has watched swallow people whole. “The creative space isn’t easy, there isn’t a high retention rate,” she says. “The older people get, the more they have to think about real-life questions, and they give it up in order to survive, which I think is very sad.”
Still, the record refuses despair. “Every creative, especially in Accra, needs different things in order to grow and develop, and plants have that same structure,” she muses. “I basically see the project as a guide: if you’re feeling lost, or in a transition period facing doubts and questions, it’s about how to move through that and choose acceptance at the end of the day, and still choose joy through the uncertainty.”
‘In The City’, track five of seven on the EP, holds that same yin and yang; finding meaning in the hustle and bustle, joy in the uncertainty, love despite the anxiety. Here, Anabel describes the desert in which many other flowers bloom alongside her. She is part of a music collective called 99PHACES, made up of DJs, producers and recording artists, and she talks about the beauty of persevering together.
“The idea behind us existing is that the industry is so hard if you’re starting out as an independent artist,” she explains. “We realised every single person has a strength or a skill, genre-wise, so we can help each other create and go further. I met them as soon as I arrived in Ghana. With the producers Mēl, Insvne Auggie and KQ, I write with them most of the time, especially Auggie. He made a lot of the songs on this project. Just understanding who I was sound-wise, and what I wanted to explore, all that experimentation, Auggie was so influential with that. Everyone just has an incredible skill.”
Anabel leaves us with a final declaration of intent. “On a higher level, it’s knowing that we are not alone in the things we’re going through. I hope that my music can help people feel seen. Especially for my creatives out here. I want them to remember.”