Genesis Owusu shares the deluxe version of Smiling With No Teeth, feat. five new tracks

Header image by Byron Spencer.

While Smiling With No Teeth came out early in the year, we knew that Genesis Owusu's debut album would be a difficult one to beat. 

The album pushed Genesis Owusu to the heights of hip-hop's upper echelon, both in Australia - where the album feels synonymous with a league of vision-capturing artists, including peers such as Sampa The Great - and internationally; the album occupying spots in mid-year lists from every corner of hip-hop's far-reaching arms. It's an album that would be incredibly difficult to trump too; the vision of Smiling With No Teeth both empowering and intimate, as Genesis veers through topics of mental health, racism and self-expression through genre-defying musicality that switches between funk, rap, indie and punk.

It's the type of culture-defining album that felt like an absolute process to go through, with the final product being a testament to blood, sweat and tears - metaphorical and literal - that Genesis and his band had to go through to create. That is why we were so surprised to hear his return just a few months later, with Same Thing - Genesis Owusu's first single since Smiling With No Teeth - arriving back in June, bringing a taste of what was left on the cutting room floor of the album's sessions.

"When the band and I were creating Smiling With No Teeth, we essentially made 60 hours of music for the album in 6 days. The songs chosen for the album conveyed a very specific narrative, but we also made a lot of great music that didn't necessarily fit the album's narrative points," he said with the release of the single. "Same Thing was one of the tracks born from the seemingly limitless Smiling With No Teeth sessions. The track is still in the realm of the album's themes of mental health (more specifically, the crazy shit the mind makes up), so the video follows suit with a psychedelic barrage of both colourful and claustrophobic imagery."

Today, we welcome a surprise release from Genesis that further presents the vision of Smiling With No Teeth, with Missing Molars - an extended, deluxe edition of the album - arriving in the form of five new tracks, including Same Thing which arrived at the start of June. Missing Molars further extends the groundwork of the debut album, capturing sound-defying sonics of the record and the missing pieces that together with the previous edition of the album, point further to Genesis's multi-facetedness, and everything he communicates through that.

"Missing Molars is an extension of Smiling With No Teeth," he says on the record. "A small collection of tracks from the Smiling With No Teeth 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 boundary."

The collection of tracks perfectly fit within the context of the album, doubling down on the black dog concept of the record as well as its versatility, and the empowering self-expression that remains the core theme of Genesis Owusu and his art. It's something that Genesis excitingly appears to be keen to showcase beyond the confinements of the album too, with Missing Molars being a treat that never needed to come out, but one we're so incredibly glad has ended up arriving. 

You can revisit our feature interview with Genesis Owusu from the release of Smiling With No Teeth here, but otherwise, take a dive into the Missing Molars collection below, and further bask in the glory of Genesis Owusu:

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