Genesis Owusu is already back with new music, launching his new single, Same Thing
Fresh from the release of his captivating debut album Smiling With No Teeth, Ghanaian-Australian musician continues to showcase his excellence.
While we haven't quite reached 2021's mid-point just yet, there's no denying that Genesis Owusu's debut album Smiling With No Teeth is going to be somewhere towards the top end when it comes to year-end album lists. Arriving two months back, Smiling With No Teeth was a lesson in communicating identity through excellence; capturing the highs and lows of the Ghanian-Australian musician's experiences throughout his lifetime with a punk-y, genre-less flow that's near uncomparable within Australian hip-hop, with only a few being able to hold a candle to the cohesiveness of Genesis' debut album.
As we learnt with our feature profile on the musician, Smiling With No Teeth was made as his band - Touch Sensitive founder Michael DiFrancesco on bass, Kirin J Callinan on guitar, World Champion’s Julian Sudek on drums, and manager / OURNESS label co-founder Andrew Klippel on keys - held themselves up in day-long, round-the-clock sessions; the end result spurting days worth of music that would later be refined down to less than an hour.
Now, however - just months following the album's release - we're already getting a taste of what was left on the cutting room floor. Same Thing is one of those songs, and while it was scrapped as it didn't match the overall vision for the album, it's a single that certainly stands its height in sound. Arriving today, Same Thing captures the bright-yet-precise sound of Genesis Owusu, flowing between mannerisms of hip-hop, R&B, pop, indie and electronica as he fuses together musical worlds with the charm that makes Genesis Owusu's music stand tall from the crowd.
"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 says on creating his debut album, before explaining how Same Thing fits into the story. "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."
Despite everything he's proven throughout the year, it's clear Genesis Owusu isn't quite done yet. His genre-fleeting sound has already defined Australian hip-hop on both a local and international scale this year, and while some artists would prefer to hide the songs left behind, there's something special about everything Genesis makes - even the scraps, as Same Thing proves, per se.
He's basically finished his national album tour with just a few postponed dates remaining, but you can take a dive into Same Thing and its video clip below, and stay tuned as the Genesis camp promise more twists and turns to come.