Over the past couple of years, I’ve spilled quite a bit of virtual ink covering the acclaimed and rapidly rising Ghanian-born, Canberra-based JOVM mainstay Genesis Owusu. With the release of his debut EP, 2017’s Cardrive, Owusu — born Kofi Owusu-Anash — quickly established a reptuation for being a restless, genre-blurring chameleon, whose work is rooted in powerful and deeply personal storytelling.
Owusu-Anash’s critically applauded full-length debut 2021’s Smiling With No Teeth as the acclaimed Ghanian-Aussie artist explained at the time, is essentially about “performing what the world wants to see, even if you don’t have the capacity to do so honestly. Slathering honey on your demons to make them palatable to people, who only want to know if you’re okay, if the answer is yes. That’s the idea, turned into beautiful, youthful, ugly, timeless and strange music.”
Each of the album’s 15 tracks can trace their origins back to studio jam sessions with a backing band that features Kirin J. Callinan, Touch Sensitive’s Michael DiFrancesco, World Champion‘s Julian Sudek and the album’s producer Andrew Klippel.
Building upon the momentum of Smiling With No Teeth, the Ghanian-Aussie JOVM mainstay released the Missing Molars EP back in July 2021. The five-track EP served as an accompaniment to Smiling With No Teeth. Recorded during the Smiling With No Teeth sessions, the Missing Molars EP material didn’t make the album — but manage to further continue the soul-baring narrative of the album. “Missing Molars is an extension of Smiling With No Teeth,” Owusu-Anash explains. “A small collection of tracks from the SWNT sessions that take the already established world-building groundwork of the album, and expand that universe into new and unexplored places. These are all tracks that I felt were special in their own right and needed to be shared. This is music without boundaries.”
Adding to a breakthrough year, Owusu-Anash went on several sold-out tours, made his Stateside late night TV debut. As for SWNT, the album landed on a number of Best of Lists across the globe, including being named as triple j’s Album of the Year. The album also earned four ARIA Awards, including Album of the Year, Hip Hop Release, Artwork and Independent Release.
2022 was an even busier year for the JOVM mainstay: He spent much of the year on the road, making stops across the global festival circuit with sets at Lollapalooza, Osheaga and a list of of others. He also made his headlining Stateside debut, which included a stop at Bowery Ballroom, which I covered for my friends at Musicology.xyz. The JOVM mainstay also opened for a series of internationally renowned artists including Khraungbin, Thundercat, and Tame Impala.
The JOVM mainstay also managed to release two standalone singles:
“GTFO,” a woozy and anthemic song featuring a looped, warbling choir and wobbling bass serving as an eerie yet soaring bed for Owusu-Anash’s rapid-fire flow, military beats, explosive cymbal crashes and a shout-along-worthy chorus. While further cementing his reputation for being a restlessly experimental artist, the song also finds the listener thrown even deeper into the Ghanian-Aussie artist’s innermost world with an unvarnished, unsettling honesty.
“Get Inspired,” a Dann Hume and Andrew Klippel co-produced seamless synthesis of elements of New Wave, EDM, punk and hip-hop centered around an angular and propulsive bass line, a relentless mootrik groove, distorted guitars and the JOVM’s punchily delivered lyrical jabs and uppercuts. Continuing Owusu-Anash’s reputation for boldly defying and mashing genres, there’s even a falsetto delivered breakdown roughly halfway through the song.
Recently Grammy-nominated musician and producer ZHU remixed “Get Inspired” turning the menacing hybrid punk song into a grimy, club track centered around glistening synth arpeggios, skittering, trap triplets paired with tweeter and woofer rattling beats. ZHU retains Owusu-Anash’s rapid fire lyrical jabs and uppercuts but also contributes a couple of auto-tuned yet swaggering bars to a remix that steps up the world-dominating swagger. “Zhu wanting to remix ‘Get Inspired’ was a pretty crazy thing to hear,” Owusu-Anash says. “He really came through to twist it into a grimy club track, and even came to spit some bars of his own.”