Acclaimed, multi-ARIA Award-winning Ghanian-born, Canberra-based JOVM mainstay Genesis Owusu‘s sophomore album 2023’s STRUGGLER was an exploration of the chaos and absurdity of life, our ability to endure and how to get through it all.
The album’s material was deeply inspired by a close friend hitting the brink and coming through the other side, and questions of life and beauty that he found himself contemplating during readings of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
Recorded between the States and Australia, STRUGGLER‘s producers traversed several different musical genres — and includes Jason Evigan, who has worked with RUFUS DU SOL and SZA; Mikey Freedom Hart, who worked on Jon Batiste’s 2021 Grammy of the Year Album, We Are; Sol Was, who worked on Beyoncé’s Renaissance; and Owusu’s long-time collaborators and producers Andrew Klippel and Dave Hammer.
Earlier this year, the acclaimed JOVM mainstay released “PIRATE RADIO,” the first bit of material since the release of his sophomore album, which I hope means a new album is on the horizon. But in the meantime, Owusu shares the fittingly Halloween-themed “DEATH CULT ZOMBIE.” Anchored around a punchy, hook-driven punk rock-meets-Brit pop arrangement, the acclaimed Aussie’s punchy in-your-face vocal delivers observations on the deeply entrenched thought indoctrination, divisive global conversations and absurd circular logic of our mad, mad, mad world — with song scathingly mocking Christian Nationalists, Donald Trump and his MAGA death cult. The song points out that we’re in a figurative zombie apocalypse, and the lemmings are blindly jumping off the cliff . . .
“For most people, the shaking up of what they consider to be true is too scary and inconvenient. Once you’ve picked your truth, you live by it staunchly despite whatever pesky ‘facts’ and ‘logic’ get in the way,” Genesis Owusu explains. “Pride won’t let you be wrong, fear won’t let you be free, dogma won’t let you be aware. The delusion is more comfortable. But the longer you sit in that delusion, the faster the zombification spreads through your body like a plague; like a scourge. Gotta be brave enough to break from the cult.”
Directed by Issac Brown, the accompanying video for “DEATH CULT ZOMBIE” follows the acclaimed JOVM mainstay desperately trying to escape a collection of Thriller-meets-Internet troll-like zombies — with a fitting spooky season twist.