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Genesis Owusu: 'I'm Prince, if he were a rapper in 2020s Australia'

Genesis Owusu’s freaky, funky marvel of a debut album bears the patina of a time-worn fable. Smiling With No Teeth – a 15-track collection of post-punk thrums; synths that scream and sigh; and sometimes crooned, sometimes snarled vocals – is its own world, with a distinct geography, iconography and ideology. And before its creator launches you into it, he handily offers a prologue in the form of new wave-y lead single The Other Black Dog: “A tale of Black dogs with golden leashes … Broken stories, told facetious … Who’s the pet and who’s the teacher?”

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Now 22, Owusu was born Kofi Owusu-Ansah in Ghana, then moved to Canberra, Australia when he was two. Canberra, like much of Australia, is extremely white, and although there are tight-knit non-white communities to be found everywhere, institutions like schools often remain ignorant of the experiences of people of colour. Owusu-Ansah’s brother, the rapper Citizen Kay, was five years his elder, meaning that the pair only went to school together for a year before Owusu-Ansah was on his own.

“I had to figure this shit out myself, because all the Black people I knew were the people that came to the country with me,” Owusu-Ansah recalls from his new home base of Sydney. “There [were] no real role models to get advice from. It was definitely interesting being in a white space like that, but it kind of taught me, to the [most extreme] extent, how to be myself.”

That Owusu-Ansah is a world-builder is likely of no surprise to anyone who knows him. “Before I started writing music, as a kid, I was writing short stories,” he recalls. “And then I was writing poetry, and then I was writing music. My favourite album of all time is [Kendrick Lamar’s] To Pimp a Butterfly, which is a conceptual masterpiece. Creating my album, I wanted to encapsulate that same feeling where this music is intentional. I’m not just making music for the sake of it.”

And so Smiling With No Teeth drips intent, clear about its focal points – depression and racism – and how to represent them lyrically. The most important image is that of the two Black dogs, symbolising depression and racism, but also taken from a slur hurled at Owusu-Ansah as the only Black child in a blindingly white area.

“I wanted to talk about these topics but I didn’t want to just be like: ‘Here are a whole bunch of statistics,’” Owusu-Ansah explains. Personifying depression and racism gave him a chance to evoke the very real tension and danger they present in the real world, and to explore the way the former heightens the latter – an acknowledged truth that feels rarely discussed. “Going through racial abuse as a kid wouldn’t do wonders for one’s mental health, and then being in white spaces after that might exacerbate the paranoia of that situation. Making them into characters made it a bit easier to elaborate on how they interact with each other, because I can frame it like a relationship between two people.”

This repeated iconography provides a through line for what is a remarkably varied debut, touching upon anthemic 80s rock (on Kirin J Callinan-featuring highlight Drown), synth-funk, out-and-out punk (Black Dogs) and everything in between. Owusu-Ansah achieved this frenetic, hard-to-pin-down style by bucking a more traditional producers-and-beats A&R method – which he had used in the past – and instead holing down with a band, made up of Callinan on guitar, house producer Touch Sensitive on bass, World Champion’s Julian Sudek on drums, and Andrew Klippel, founder of Owusu-Ansah’s label Ourness, on keys.

“I’ve been working with producers my whole career until this point, and it wasn’t erratic enough for me, really. It wasn’t chaotic,” Owusu-Ansah says. “Like, me and one other person can think of some weird shit. Five people with their own instruments, who can do whatever they want, whenever they want, that was way more fun – way more experimentation, and I’m always about that, I’m always about the rollercoaster rides.”

Owusu-Ansah probably could have made a simpler, less labour-intensive album and still coasted to a successful debut based purely on the plaudits he’s accrued since breaking out with 2017 single Sideways – he is a two-time nominee at the Arias (the Australian equivalent of the Grammys), has been supported by star-making radio station Triple J, and routinely astonishes crowds with a live show that includes rose petal-throwing hype men and a superhuman expenditure of energy – but he is far too ambitious for that.

“I love and respect what I’ve put out so far, but [my old] singles only feel 99% true to me, and that’s not good enough,” Owusu-Ansah says. His debut album, on the other hand, is 100% true, assuaging the occasional “paranoia” he feels when considering that fans may see his pre-2020 output as indicative of his range. “Even though it’s 99% true, I still feel somewhat disingenuous.”

That truth is wilder and more thrilling than one could imagine. Inspired equally by Prince and Talking Heads – “But like if Prince were a rapper, in 2020, in Australia” – Smiling With No Teeth might freak some out, but feels more likely to win fans than lose them. Either way, Owusu-Ansah doesn’t really care: “I have no interest in being like some random pop star or rap star with a million random people who don’t really care about me as an artist,” he says. “I want to reach people who will really understand it.”

Smiling With No Teeth is out now