Ayra Starr Vancouver Concert — Next Date & Ticket Alerts

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About Ayra Starr

Oyinkansola Sarah Aderibigbe was born on June 14, 2002 in Cotonou, the largest city in Benin, the second of four children of Nigerian parents who moved between Benin and Lagos through her childhood. Her father worked in business and her mother kept the household; her older brother Dami Oyinkan — who records and produces as Milar — became her first creative collaborator and remains one of her closest co-writers. The family relocated back to Lagos when she was a child, settling on the Lagos mainland, and she grew up listening to a wide span of West African and global pop: Asa, Brandy, Beyoncé, Rihanna, 2Face Idibia, Tiwa Savage, Asake before he was Asake, and the broader Nigerian Afrobeats scene that was scaling through the 2010s. She studied at Les Cours Sonou University in Cotonou and continued through Lead City University in Ibadan, modeled briefly as a teenager — Quove Models in Lagos signed her — and started posting cover videos on Instagram in 2019 and 2020 while still in her late teens. A cover of Damian Marley's Beautiful caught the attention of Don Jazzy, the Mavin Records founder and one of the most influential figures in modern Nigerian music, who DM'd her after the clip circulated and brought her in for studio sessions in 2020. Mavin signed her in January 2021 and released her self-titled debut EP — five tracks including Away, the first single, which went viral on TikTok inside its first month and put her on Apple Music's Up Next program for Africa. The breakthrough came nine months later: the full-length 19 & Dangerous in August 2021, with Bloody Samaritan as the lead single. Bloody Samaritan topped Apple Music Nigeria and became the first solo female Nigerian record to do so — a benchmark the local press repeated for the entire album cycle — and the song's defiant chorus, swung Afrobeats production, and quotable hook gave Ayra Starr a national-scale signature record before her twentieth birthday. Rush followed in September 2022 as a standalone single and pushed her into the global tier: charting in the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, France, and across the African continent, soundtracking TikTok dance trends, and earning her a Grammy nomination for Best African Music Performance in the inaugural category cycle. Sability sustained the run through 2023, the Kelly Rowland remix of Bloody Samaritan in 2022 widened the audience further, the David Guetta link on Big Energy expanded her dance-music footprint, and the Coldplay collaboration on Good Feelings — released as part of the Moon Music album cycle — confirmed she could sit on a Coldplay record without being absorbed by it. The Year I Turned 21 arrived in May 2024 as her second studio album, a coming-of-age project tracking the gap between Bloody Samaritan and the global Ayra Starr brand. Commas led the era, Last Heartbreak Song with Giveon delivered the crossover R&B moment, Goodbye (Warm Up) and Bad Vibes with Seyi Vibez kept the Lagos audience anchored, and the project earned BET, MOBO, and MTV Europe Music Award attention across the cycle. Mavin Records — founded by Don Jazzy in 2012 after the dissolution of Mo'Hits — sits behind the operation alongside her management team, with her brother Milar credited on production and writing across multiple cuts. The personal brand is as carefully built as the music: a signature aesthetic blending Yoruba cultural references, Y2K low-rise styling, and high-fashion editorial work that has put her on the cover of Vogue, Elle, Allure, and Dazed, plus campaigns with Coach, Pepsi, and Bvlgari.

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