Genesis Owusu

Genesis Owusu teams with Mick Jenkins on "Don't Need You" remix; debut LP out now

Ghanaian-Australian artist Genesis Owusu released one of the year’s most acclaimed debut albums with Smiling With No Teeth, a very unique album that fuses together distorted electronics, punk energy, blissful R&B, hip hop, psychedelic pop, and more, and features a song with guest vocals by Kirin J Callinan (who’s also the guitarist in Genesis’ studio band). More background, via Genesis’ bio:

Genesis Owusu (aka Kofi Owusu-Ansah), unpicks concepts of race, identity and belonging on Smiling With No Teeth, entwining his own experience immigrating to Canberra from Ghana as a child. The album’s title—a reference to the way outsiders have to pretend things are okay when they’re not—introduces the record’s “black dog” motif. The “black dog” embodies both an external character, representing society’s outcasts, and the internal demon, that is the inner voice or anxiety that comes with living as an outcast.

Genesis keeping the momentum going with a new remix of album highlight “Don’t Need You,” which features a newly-added verse by Chicago rap great Mick Jenkins. “I’ve been listening to Mick Jenkins since I was in high school, so it’s surreal to have my first official remix and my second ever feature to be with him,” Genesis says. “We global, baby.”

Listen to the new remix and the full album below…