Genesis Owusu shuffles on stage, and he have to be nearly 9 ft tall. He’s sporting sun shades that appear like the compound eyes of a fly. A pink stripe slashes down the centre of his bald head – one thing he calls the Mark of the Roach (extra on that later). Crimson gloved palms, reaching for his neck, are affixed to his shoulders. The looped, ascending beat of ‘The Different Black Canine’ begins as he disrobes to change into human top and two of his “goons” – hype males in balaclavas – emerge.
That is what number of of Genesis Owusu’s stay reveals have begun over the past yr – an arresting introduction that indicators a brand new period for the outsider artist. “When folks see me [live] for the primary time it’s like, ‘What the fuck? What the fuck? OK, that’s form of cool. Oh shit! I like this one’,” he tells NME. “I take pleasure in that rollercoaster of emotion.”
The 25-year-old artist, born Kofi Owusu-Ansah, took his residence nation of Australia by storm in 2021 with the discharge of his debut album ‘Smiling With No Tooth’, a report that hinges on the weighty metaphor of two black canines, one embodying despair and the opposite racism. Soundtracked by The Black Canine Band, a ramshackle group that might swerve from punk to funk to jazz to industrial rock, ‘Smiling With No Tooth’ was a placing assertion on being an outcast, creatively and in any other case.
Within the two years since its launch, Owusu-Ansah has been something however: dancing on stage at Madison Sq. Backyard with Hayley Williams and Lil Uzi Vert, sweeping Australia’s nationwide music awards, stealing the present at Bose and NME’s C23 stay showcase at Austin’s SXSW, and headlining a sold-out Sydney Opera Home backed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. It’s the final of people who has obtained him shaking his head. “I keep in mind performing that night time and being like, ‘Rattling, that is so loopy. The place does it even go from right here? What do I do subsequent?’”
Owusu-Ansah is adjusting to life as the primary character, and it hasn’t all been simple. He barely had time to course of his newfound standing earlier than the calls began coming in for album quantity two. Whereas ‘Smiling With No Tooth’ was a “neat story” instructed at one go – “I might inform you which day we began and the way lengthy we jammed for” – the creation of ‘Struggler’ was a scramble for time between press and tour commitments.
Owusu-Ansah and The Black Canine Band made ‘Smiling With No Tooth’ in sweaty, hours-long jam periods, however for ‘Struggler’ he underwent what he calls “producer velocity relationship”: going into completely different periods with completely different producers in Los Angeles day-after-day for 2 months.
A few of his dates have been “fucking wacky”, Owusu-Ansah says. “They have been like, ‘Alright, inform me your life story. OK, this, this, this? Let’s do that. Increase’… That was very a lot not the way in which I used to be used to working.”
Jason Evigan, whose credit embody Britney Spears, Maroon 5 and Kelly Clarkson, was one of many “worthy bachelors” Owusu-Ansah related with essentially the most. “He heard slightly pattern, and imagined what it could sound like if he’d gone by your complete discography,” Owusu-Ansah says. “He was like, ‘Rattling, this might sound actually cool if it have been getting in some 9 Inch Nails course’… He fused the 2 issues: what he thought was occurring versus what is definitely occurring.”
The ensuing stylistic combine on ‘Struggler’, that includes a number of producers together with Evigan, is as expansive as Owusu-Ansah has ever been – with diversions by pop punk (‘Keep Blessed’), jungle (‘What Comes Will Come’), and new wave (‘The Roach’). His voice has developed melodically, the back-of-the-throat vocal volleys evoking Bloc Social gathering’s Kele Okereke, veering from a one-man-gang-shout to a falsetto croon. It’s outstanding then, that the report wasn’t impressed by music in any respect.
“I feel I’d really listened to the least quantity of music that I’d listened to in my life, based mostly off my Spotify Wrapped,” Owusu-Ansah laughs. “I’d been surrounded with music essentially the most I had ever been in my life… I felt the least have to hearken to it in my free time.”
Owusu-Ansah didn’t discover function in music, however in pointlessness.
“We wait. We’re bored. No, don’t protest, we’re fed up, there’s no denying it. Good. A diversion comes alongside and what can we do? We let it go to waste.”
So says the character of Vladimir in Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy Ready for Godot, an opaque, meandering play about two males who wait on a rustic highway for a 3rd that by no means arrives. The turmoil skilled by the characters – who keep put, their feverish dialogue rumbling alongside as their lack of function turns into ever clearer – impressed Owusu-Ansah to jot down his personal quick story a few character he known as ‘The Roach’.
“The [Roach] is operating just about the entire story. However as they’re operating, they’re going by this complete psychological disaster – ‘OK, I have to run to outlive’. After which as they’re operating: ‘Why do I really want to run? What’s the purpose of operating? Is there a degree? Oh, shit, possibly there’s not a degree. Perhaps I can determine my very own level’,” he explains. “The precise story is happening within the character’s head. And basically, all they’re actually doing is simply making an attempt to outlive.”
That quick story fashioned the bedrock of ‘Struggler’. The innumerable pressures we’ve all confronted in the previous couple of years – be it illness, catastrophe, poverty – amalgamate right into a god determine who’s making an attempt to smite the Roach because it runs: “There’s an outdated man within the sky, simply ready to fuck my life up,” Owusu-Ansah bellows on ‘Previous Man’.
“This world simply appears increasingly more complicated and chaotic as issues go by,” he muses. “It appears like life closes in round you typically, particularly while you’re at your lowest. That’s an enormous a part of the character as effectively – the wrestle of being at your lowest however nonetheless having to combat to the following day.”
The crises within the Roach’s thoughts are a journey by forsaken philosophies, starting with survival, rolling by nihilism and existentialism, after which touchdown on the absurdist conclusion that there isn’t a level – and that’s lovely. Owusu-Ansah’s mantra for locating equilibrium in our actuality coalesces round a biblical reference on the one ‘Tied Up’: “It’s Sodom and Gomorrah / Vogue, strike a pose”.
“Sooner or later, you may fucking burn all the way down to ashes. However at the moment, the solar has risen, and also you get to spend time with your folks and, like, fuckin’ see a cute chook stroll throughout the road. Like, that’s so superior,” he says, guffawing.
While operating his personal roach race, Owusu-Ansah spent lower than 40 days over the past yr in his hometown of Canberra. His household immigrated to Australia’s capital from Ghana when he was three years outdated and has lived there ever since. The seat of the nation’s authorities, Canberra (and significantly the Catholic college Owusu-Ansah attended) is way much less various and cosmopolitan than Sydney or Melbourne. However over time, Owusu-Ansah grew to embrace his individuality, expressing it in the way in which he dressed and the music he listened to.
Regardless of the size of his current success, he has refused to maneuver to an even bigger metropolis, claiming Canberra permits him to “calm down his shoulders” – very important, after a world tour that noticed him tour the US with Paramore, rearrange his oddball beats with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and put his stamp on boutique European venues.
Genesis Owusu reveals are bursts of costumed and choreographed spontaneity. He made nationwide headlines when the dancefloor of the 115-year-old Enmore Theatre in Sydney collapsed throughout one among his gigs. Taking part in at Berghain, the Berlin nightclub notorious for its debauchery and ultra-selective entrance coverage, Owusu-Ansah’s goons turned masochistic.
“One in all my goons did three consecutive stage dives,” he remembers. “[He] cracked his head open on one of many foldback audio system. We’re taking part in ‘Black Canines!’ on the time, and I simply fucking amped him up. He simply stored going, blood dripping throughout his face. It was insane.”
However the vitality Owusu-Ansah cultivates for his Goon Membership is greater than mere catharsis: he seeks to create an entire outsider artist program. In Sydney, Mongolian throat singer Bukhu opened his present, taking part in the horsehead fiddle and lulling the viewers into harmonic stupor together with his resonant voice. “I like being with folks which might be on a very completely different wavelength to me, as a result of it’s nearly like by the variations we’re on the identical wavelength,” Owusu-Ansah says.
Owusu-Ansah conceived a lot of ‘Smiling With No Tooth’s visible id himself, however entrusted the aesthetic of ‘Struggler’ to New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana, whose influential multimedia work examines early encounters between Polynesians and European explorers.
Reihana’s music movies for ‘Leaving The Gentle’ and ‘Tied Up’ are indirect, science fiction conceptions of Owusu-Ansah because the Roach, his eyes hidden from sight by blindfolds or darkish tumours that oscillate throughout his physique. Within the former, he’s operating throughout a craggy interplanetary panorama, and within the latter he’s engaged in a boxing match with God.
“I used to be actually impressed by these early Gorillaz music movies,” Owusu-Ansah explains. “Seeing these issues as a child and at all times desirous to know what the story was, nevertheless it being out of my grasp – having to play with it in my head till I might discover a throughline.”
Each of Genesis Owusu’s albums have been high-concept, multimedia epic poems with that means etched into each choice. If ‘Smiling With No Tooth’ was a uncooked and quasi-improvised starting, on ‘Struggler’ he refines his narrative past memoir and into boundless semi-fiction. He’s a bonafide author – and it leaves his music with no limits.
“I’ve realised that I’m only a storyteller,” Owusu-Ansah says. “By way of the years, the medium has simply became how I inform that story. Proper now, I’m telling the story by albums. Earlier than that, I used to be telling the story by poetry. Earlier than that, I used to be writing literal quick tales. Earlier than that, as a child, I used to be only a fucking liar.”
Genesis Owusu’s new album ‘Struggler’ is out on August 18 through OURNESS. He excursions the US, EU/UK and Australia from October – discover extra information right here.
Hearken to Genesis Owusu’s unique playlist to accompany The Cowl under on Spotify and right here on Apple Music
Author: Josh Martin
Photographer: Bailey Howard
Styling: Genesis Owusu
Label: Ourness
Mgmt: Andrew Klippel
