Marieme was not supposed to be in the room. DESIREE was hosting a writing camp in Johannesburg in November 2025 when another artist brought Marieme along, and an impromptu studio session turned into "Heartbreaker," out now on Ninja Tune.

What does Heartbreaker actually sound like?

Forget the typical amapiano single built around a log-drum hook and a shouted ad-lib. "Heartbreaker" keeps amapiano's rolling, bubbling percussion but runs it through house and techno drum programming, then puts a full R&B and jazz vocal on top instead of the usual chant. DESIREE described the writing session plainly: "Everyone's met a heartbreaker. This one's for the moment you stop crying over him and start laughing about him with your girls." Marieme called the result "so sexy and raw," and said she loved "the movement of it and how it sounds like the perfect portrayal of emotions as old as time."

"Everyone's met a heartbreaker. This one's for the moment you stop crying over him and start laughing about him with your girls."

Why put an indie R&B singer on an amapiano record?

Marieme is not a session vocalist for hire in the amapiano pipeline. She is a Senegalese-American artist who moved to Los Angeles in 2017 and built her own lane in soul-leaning electronic music, racking up credits with Groove Armada, Above & Beyond and Vintage Culture along the way, and over 14 million streams on her own material. Dropping that voice into an amapiano-rooted track is a different move than hiring a featured vocalist to chant a hook: it treats the genre as a production palette other songwriters can plug into, not a closed system.

Is this proof amapiano-house is breaking out?

DESIREE's year makes the case better than any press release. The Johannesburg DJ and producer, who won DJ Mag's Future Star award in 2023 and runs her own label MMINO, has opened for both Black Coffee and Solomun this year and played festival stages at GALA and Lost Village, according to Mixtape Madness. A UK label best known for trip hop and left-field electronic names, not amapiano specialists, picking up her collaboration with an American R&B artist is exactly the kind of crossover signing that moves a scene from "festival curiosity" to "catalogue act."

Why it matters

Amapiano-house has spent two years breaking through on festival lineups and Boiler Room sets; signing an outside-genre collaboration to a label like Ninja Tune is a different, slower kind of validation, the sort that builds a back catalogue rather than a viral moment.

What we think

The smart part isn't that DESIREE got a known vocalist. It's that she didn't flatten the amapiano groove to fit Marieme's voice, or flatten Marieme's voice into a generic amapiano chant. Both styles stay recognisably themselves, which is harder to pull off than it sounds and is why this lands as a real collaboration instead of a feature-for-clout exercise.