The Ghanaian-Australian visionary delivered the best work of his career with May’s satirical, scathing and stylistically probing REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE. He’s mad at the world, but not afraid to laugh at it.

Few contemporary artists obtain the boldness and bravery of Ghanaian-Australian rapper, vocalist and wordsmith Genesis Owusu. His latest and third record, REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE, shared in mid-May via OURNESS, has been touted as one of the year’s very best. And with good reason – thematically dense and fierce, lyrically potent and playful, sonically speculative, the work is an amalgam of an artistic tenure centred on self-cognisance and vividly understanding the imperfect world that surrounds him; allergic to plateauing, always growing.

Compellingly tackling cavernous, consequential topics that range from climatic crisis to racism, authoritarianism to personal inner turmoil, the 28-year-old’s thoughtful and intelligent writing shapes an album narrative that never falls into despair – instead presenting an enthralling, enraged and ultimately entertaining elysium of agency, anger and articulation. 

From raw punk to hazy dance, abstract hip hop to anthemic indie, the LP tackles a kaleidoscope of sonic shades, impressive in its progression from its maker’s prior two full-length works: the sprawling character study of his 2021 debut Smiling With No Teeth, and his high-concept 2023 follow-up STRUGGLER. The latest work was produced by New Zealand-born, Wales-based soundscaper Dan Hume in his home studio in small-town Barry. A place of quiet reflection, Owusu moved into the Kiwi’s home for two months or so, with the pair doing little else but creating and chiselling the work. The result feels maximalist yet concise, grandiose yet intimate, without fear yet bustling with admonitions.

Born in Ghana before moving to the Australian capital of Canberra aged two – with his parents uprooting their lives in the hope of a better education and a brighter future for him and his brother – Owusu had “no choice” but to be the outsider, he says, sitting in a coffee shop in central London while in the capital for a live show earlier this summer. It’s a facet of his formative years that has dictated his persona and his artistry, resolute against the malaise of normalcy, a voice for the unspoken, a voracious vessel of exploration.  

Owusu has since also unveiled a further single, “HUMAN AGAIN”, a track that feels very much within his third album’s sonic and thematic world. Insatiably innovative and overwhelmingly prolific, the artist’s ceiling seems to be rising with each passing sonic admission. With American and European tours on the horizon before the year is out, his stock will inevitably continue to rise, and his message will remain one that needs to be heard – now more than ever. Below, he talks about reclaiming his Ghanaian heritage, the meaning behind his third album, and the power in being a misfit.

Listen to REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE…

Read the exclusive interview…

First of all, congrats on the record! It feels like such important work, especially during the times we’re living through. Why do you think people don’t really make music that challenges and surveys the world? Why are some artists afraid of action through an art form that people can digest?

I think there are different reasons why people get into the creative medium of writing music. I think a lot of them are valid, even if they’re not quite as glittery or noble. Some people want to get famous; that’s fine. Some people want to make people dance; that’s fine. Some people want a Grammy or to make money; that’s fine. For me, personally, literally from day one to now, it was about expressing myself internally and making it tangible. Regardless of whether that came with fame or accolades, that’s what I wanted to do; that’s the reason why I do this. 

This album is how it comes into the fold, because this is how I feel, and I just use music to express how I feel. I think other artists might feel the same way, but maybe that’s not why they got into the industry, maybe they did it to make people dance. Or maybe they do want to say it, and they’re scared… in which case, grow up. 

You say it’s been your goal since the beginning – what did that look and sound like when you started making music?

I was talking a lot about depression and mental health. My first album [Smiling With No Teeth] is split into two halves: the first half is about depression, and the other is about racism. It was just me using music as a language to make sense of the things I was feeling, both internally and externally. 

What’s so striking to me is how cohesive you present your ideas. How has that process developed over the years? 

I’ve met more people and have more resources, so now I can make the final product more cohesive and polished than what I was able to do before. But I think the mentality behind it has stayed the same. I’ve always loved telling stories, so it hasn’t felt like I have gone from point A to point Z. Rather, each chapter feels like I’m telling a story. Like I’m an author, and this is just the next narrative. 

Were you a musical child, or is it something you picked up later in life? 

I was a child born into a family of music appreciators, rather than music executors. My brother was the only one who played an instrument, but everyone in my family is a big music fan. So, I was always around music. 

Is there anything instrumentally that you’re learning now? 

I’ve always been doodling in my life, but never sat down and had the discipline to master an instrument.      

It’s like learning a language; I wish I had learned a language properly when I was a kid.

I started learning a language three years ago. It’s going pretty good. I started with French, and now I’m upper intermediate. Then I tried Japanese, but that’s fucking hard, so I’m a beginner. For this album, we went back to Ghana to shoot the music videos, so in Accra, I started learning Twi, my native Ghanaian language. I moved [to Canberra, Australia] when I was two, so I never really learnt it.

I can only imagine how a move like that at such a young age would’ve impacted you, even if you were too young to properly formulate it. Do you feel, subconsciously, that you were born an outsider, that you had something to prove?

Yes, absolutely. It’s definitely why I am who I am today. It’s why the music is how it is. Even having the idea to step outside of the norm came from the fact that I was initially out of the norm; I had no other choice. When I first set foot in Canberra, Australia, which is a white-as-fuck place, and I look like this, I had no choice but to be the outsider. So you could either try to contort and distort yourself into ways that will never quite work, or you could just embrace it and be the outsider. Which is how I started talking the way I talk, dressing the way I dress. And making the music that I make – by just leaning into the unexpected. 

What is Canberra like? 

I’ve grown to love it. It’s my home. I’m often on tour, so I bounce around a lot, but I still live there. It’s a very quiet place. As a place, it was easy to create what I wanted to create because it was like a blank canvas. I made this album in Barry, Wales, and it’s kind of a similar vibe because there’s nothing to do, so you’re forced to ruminate within yourself on all these ideas and make them a reality. There’s no music industry in Canberra, so if you want to do something, you have to make it happen. I feel like it builds character if you want to be an artist. 

If there’s no music industry, how did you get started? 

I started with my brother; he’s the one who got me into music. I started doing gigs when I was 14 years old. We were doing all these small gigs together, and he’d always get ID’d; I never did. I had this huge beard. Then the gigs started around Canberra, and someone from Sydney promoted us, and I started getting booked in Sydney, and we just went from there. 

It was very organic and homegrown. It was really Triple J, the youth music broadcaster in Australia. There’s this thing called Triple J Unearthed High, where you can upload your music to their site, and every year they collate music from high school-aged people and put them into a national competition. I didn’t know that existed, but I had my music on there anyway. I was putting it on YouTube and SoundCloud, so it was another place to host it. I qualified for the top five high schoolers in the country for that year. That was the first time I got eyes and ears around the country, and it went from there. I kind of fell into it, in a way.

Yeah, that’s so organic, especially compared to the way a lot of things work out today. Were you called Genesis Owusu originally? 

At that time, yes, I was Genesis Owusu. The name came from my brother, because we were catching the same bus. My name is Kofi, but back then, everyone called me coffee. My brother’s friends would always ask, “What’s your brother’s name?” and he would say Kofi, and they didn’t believe him, and he just made up the name Genesis to get them off his back. That name stuck, and Owusu is part of my last name.

You mentioned that you went back to Ghana to film the music videos. What part of Ghana are you from originally? 

I’m from Koforidua, which is in the Eastern region, and was filming mainly in the capital.

Is that the first time you’ve been back in almost a decade? 

Yeah.

From when you were a teenager, who must’ve felt somewhat Australian and also Ghanaian, how did you feel then, and how did it feel going back recently? How is your relationship with that heritage?

It’s always been a thing that is so ingrained, maybe subconscious, but it was definitely below the surface. I moved when I was two, but my parents were almost 40 already. It was a Ghanaian household, but when you open the door to the outside world, you’re in Australia. So there are a lot of things that I’ve acclimatised to, behaviours I thought were just general behaviours but were Ghanaian, and I didn’t really put the dots together. It wasn’t a surface-level thing, where I knew the politics and language, and stuff like that. But I was quite disconnected in a lot of ways. So yeah, it was really enlightening for me in a lot of ways to go back to Ghana, especially as an adult and put those dots together that I never really put together before, and try to really immerse myself in a top-layer way and get back to learning my language and things like that.

It was really cool making those music videos because the whole crew was Ghanaian as well. Meeting other natives my age and them taking me around. Yeah, it was really important to reconnect. I got my Ghanaian passport back, so I’m making an effort to try to go back every year. 

And your parents moved back, was that last year? 

Yes, they moved back last year. That was the original reason I went back, not to shoot the music videos; I was just going to visit them, and we were there.       

Are they happy to move back?

Super.

What was the reason they moved in the first place? 

It was just for me and my brother. It was for better educational opportunities, and then yeah, we grew up and became musicians and got some success, and they’re like, “Alright, we’ve done our job.”

Were you always political? 

Yeah. I mean, I had to be – before I ever knew what politics meant. I said it in another interview, but when I was in early high school, like Seventh Grade, I was talking about some racism that had occurred, and someone was like, “You don’t have to make everything so political”, and I didn’t know what it meant.

A year or two later, the Black Lives Matter movement really kicked off, and I remember all the discourse around even the term “Black Lives Matter” being a political statement. I thought, why is Black Lives Matter a political statement? That really drilled in the point that even life itself, especially my life as a Black person, is inherently political; there’s no escaping that. You can try to bury your head in the sand, but there’s no true escaping that fact. So, yeah, I as a person am inherently political, so the music is going to be political.   

Listening to this new record, REDSTAR WU AND THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE, it’s so brash and outwardly political. Why did you choose to frame it in that brash way?

As an artist, I’ve always loved ambiguity. I’ve always loved making music and living different lives in people’s own realms. Like people taking their own interpretations and retaining new meanings for new years, especially in the life and times we’re in right now in the 2020s. This life is ambiguous, confusing, paranoid enough, and I don’t need to push things any further. I don’t have the privilege to be ambiguous anymore. This is the time to just say it directly, leave no metaphors – Elon’s a fucking weirdo, just say it. That was the ethos around making this album. That’s what makes it different to my previous two, which were more fantastical and metaphorical, and live in their own worlds. This is more right here, right now.

The album is definitely your most ambitious musically as well. Is that something that just happened naturally through you growing as a musician? 

Yeah, definitely. Since I was a child, I’ve always given myself a mission to be a boundary pusher, a lifelong student. My mission has always been to speak my truth, and to always be an explorer and dive into the deep end and go into uncomfortable places, not only for the listener, but for myself as well. That’s formulated sonically by going into a bunch of different genres and sounds. I came in as a rapper. Now, it’s like, fuck it, yeah, I’ll make the punk song, I’ll make a pop song. I get most excited by things that I haven’t done before. 

You still managed to find the humour in the blackness. Do you think that’s the key, you just have to laugh through the dark? 

I think all of it’s just so absurd; when you zoom out a little bit, it’s like, what is this? It’s like, is anyone else hearing this? It’s hilarious, and it’s awful at the same time; it’s all so absurd that you have to laugh at points. That’s all part of it; this is all so devastating, so confusing, so divisive, and so hilarious and absurd at the same time. It’s like, I want to laugh and cry and yell at the same time, you know? 

Is there a specific lyric that you feel is the emblem of what the album represents? 

I don’t know if there’s a lyric, but it’s definitely the “Worldwide Scourge” track. It’s the most concise; that pretty much sums up my mentality and my viewpoint, living on planet Earth in the 2020s. I think that’s the crux of the album, the centre part. 

What else have you got? Is there anything else on the horizon? 

I’m heading on these European festival shows, but I’ll be back for a headline UK/EU tour in November/December. So hope to see you there.