On a wide suburban street in Canberra’s Weston Creek district, with utes in driveways and front yards dotted with children’s toys, Genesis Owusu greets me at the door of his discreet, tan-coloured bungalow. His living room is neat, understatedly furnished, with timber venetian blinds closed against the afternoon sun.
In contrast to his swaggering, aggressively cool onstage persona, the Ghanaian-Australian artist, born Kofi Owusu-Ansah, is disarmingly down-to-earth. As we prepare to go, he tells me I am wearing the right shoes for our walk and asks if I was last in Canberra on a school trip to Questacon.
“I like the neighbourhood,” he says. “It’s mostly old people, which is very wholesome.”
We’ve met in the lead-up to Owusu-Ansah’s as-yet-untitled and greatly anticipated third album. It follows his acclaimed 2021 debut, Smiling With No Teeth, and its equally lauded 2023 follow-up, Struggler – both of which won the Aria album of the year. His unique mix of hip-hop, post-punk and funk earned him spots on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and at Lollapalooza and Primavera Sound international festivals.
The new album’s lead single, Pirate Radio, bristles with righteous anger over an electronic-punk pulse, but as we cross into a reserve for our walk to the peak, Owusu-Ansah exudes peace and comfort among the suburban streets and eucalypts. His easy laugh reveals two gold teeth, one printed with a red star.
As we approach a bridge to pass under, Owusu-Ansah exchanges a familiar hello with a passerby on a mobility scooter. Interactions like these, he says smiling, are one of the reasons he still chooses to live in Canberra. “Community, in general, has been quite lacking globally,” he says. “But in a place like this, it’s a bit more elevated on the priority list.”
That belief in community fuelled Owusu-Ansah’s decision to visit local fans’ homes last month. Winners were chosen for their most creative responses to a “Fuck, Marry, Kill” scenario featuring Elon Musk, Peter Dutton and “an actively burning building” – a typically Owusu-Ansah mix of political sentiment and wry, internet-era humour.
“I’d pick the people on Instagram and they’d be like the general 20-year-old Genesis Owusu fan,” he says. “Then the whole family would be waiting for me with a cheese platter in every home. It was very sweet.”
Over those plates of cheese, Owusu-Ansah shared a new music video filmed during a trip to Ghana earlier this year. Owusu-Ansah and his older brother, Kojo, were born in Koforidua and moved to Canberra with their parents in 2000, when Owusu-Ansah was two. Their parents have now returned to Ghana. It was 27-year-old Owusu-Ansah’s first time back since he was 16. He renewed his passport and citizenship and immersed himself in the Twi language. “I’m truly Ghanaian again,” he says with pride, adding that the music video was “the first thing musically I’ve done in the country, actually meeting up with other Ghanaian creatives”.
As we begin our uphill ascent along the roadside, out of the path of passing SUVs, he glances over to meet my eyes while speaking warmly about “the very, very special experience” he and his brother had reconnecting with “a bunch of aunties and uncles and cousins I haven’t seen since I was a wee lad”. His parents, meanwhile, have built their dream “retirement home” after decades of hard work and sacrifice in Canberra. “They’re growing coconut and pineapple trees, getting some chickens and ducks. They’re living good out there.”
The new album came together elsewhere entirely – during the 2024 US presidential election, in a converted church in Barry, Wales, owned by his collaborator Dann Hume.
Pirate Radio, with lines like “Elon’s a fuckin’ weirdo / who gave these incels moolah?”, is a fitting entry point into the album’s headspace. “I was in the church, so isolated and kind of watching the seams of the world tear apart around me,” Owusu-Ansah recalls. “My other albums kind of lived in their own literary worlds with their own characters and symbolism. There’s still symbolism in this one, but it’s very much on planet Earth in the 2020s.”
He says, calmly and with conviction, the album is a call to “wake the fuck up before it’s too late”, adding: “We are not each other’s enemies. Trans people and immigrants aren’t the reason your fucking eggs are expensive.”
Community is his antidote to division, he says. He’s motivated by “what we should be doing instead: coming together”.
As kangaroos watch us from a nearby field, Owusu-Ansah tells me that he does this walk every couple of weeks. He’s been on a fitness kick, and seems very at ease with the incline and the space. “You tap in, touch grass, as they say,” he says with a grin.
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Owusu-Ansah’s parents left Ghana to ensure “better opportunities for education” for him and his brother, choosing Canberra because his dad’s sister and her family – “the only people we knew in Australia” – lived there.
Arriving with “$200 in his pocket”, his dad took a job stacking shelves at Woolworths, while his mum cleaned houses. “They just grinded until we got our first apartment,” Owusu-Ansah recalls, adding that his dad later worked as a corrections officer and his mum as a teacher.
They found community at an African Pentecostal church in Woden, which Owusu-Ansah attended every weekend until he was 18. As the tech-savvy kid, he manned the projector displaying song lyrics while his brother, who is now a producer and audio engineer, played guitar. Though initially resisting music-making, once his brother converted their study into a studio, “it was, like, unavoidable”. A natural introvert, Owusu-Ansah discovered a performative side. “Whenever there was music at house parties, I’d be the one starting the dance circle.”
We pause a conversation about his love for Kid Cudi’s second album as the path begins to climb and the wind picks up. “This is where it starts getting steep, so if you ever need a break, just let me know,” he says. While Owusu-Ansah is preparing to be the centre of attention again on a run of intimate shows, including a residency at the Sydney Opera House, he’s content in the relative anonymity of Canberra. “I’m so happy to have a home base, somewhere that’s chill – an escape from the chaos of touring and travelling,” he says.
His first impressions of his adopted home town, he says, were “very white”. “But over time, once I saw what it was and who I was, and was able to comfortably walk my own trajectory, I felt like it was almost the best place I could be. It’s such a tranquil place, not too much is going on – others would use the word boring. It was like a blank slate for someone like me to colour in the colours I wanted.”
Despite multiple Aria wins, Owusu-Ansah is blunt about the economics of being an artist in the streaming era. Like many of his peers, he still rents and shares living expenses with his girlfriend, having lived with his parents for a time before they returned to Ghana. He compares the artist’s life to the glass bridge in Squid Game: you never know which step will shatter or propel you on. With career longevity in mind, he’s open to working with brands – including licensing his 2022 single Get Inspired to KFC for a campaign. “Right now, I can’t escape myself on these KFC ads,” he says with a laugh. Even his landlord mentioned them when he came by to fix the dishwasher.
We reach the peak and choose the side overlooking the low, flat expanse of Woden Valley. Unflustered by the exertion, Owusu-Ansah points out the green and brown suburb of Lyons, where he grew up, and landmarks like the Telstra Tower and Lake Burley Griffin. “These are the ends,” he says gratefully. “The place I was raised and was lucky to live.”
After the success of Struggler, he says he took time to “see the world and do my side quests”, visiting arcades in Tokyo and picking a “suit of armour” at the Queanbeyan medieval fair – “just random shit”, he says with delight.
“It’s important to take a step back, breathe, remember why I’m doing what I’m doing, and then come back when I have something to say. And then the world happened, and I came back with something to say.”
