Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman, wakes from his slumber to find himself transformed into a vermin. Gone are the fleshy parts of himself that make him human — his arms, his feet, his various appendages — and in their place is a large brown belly, an armoured back and thin pitiful legs that flail helplessly in the air.
But his first thoughts barely linger on his newly metamorphosed insect-form. Instead, he thinks, “I have to get to work.”
When Genesis Owusu read Franz Kafka’s short story, Metamorphosis, written in 1915, he was taken with the hilarity of its enduring relatability to society 100 years later. He connected with the themes of conformity, the blind acceptance of societal structures and the willingness to overlook personal need in the face of work. It made him question: what do we really live for, who do we really live for, who’s in control and why?
Two years on from his hugely successful debut album Smiling with No Teeth — which pulled him from his home in Canberra to tour all around Australia (breaking the floor of Sydney’s Enmore Theatre along the way) Europe and the US — they’re questions looking to be answered on his highly anticipated second album, STRUGGLER.
“I remember reading Metamorphosis for the first time and thinking it was so hilariously on point with how I felt today and how I felt other people felt today even though it was written decades ago,” Genesis Owusu tells Junkee.
“We’ve gone through so much: bushfires, pandemics, fucking mass depression, economic ruin. And every day, we still get up, put on the suit and tie and just go to work. That’s just the reality we have to live in. And that’s such an absurd way to live.”
Becoming The Roach
Since his breakout success in 2021, Genesis Owusu has won four ARIA Awards, including the coveted Album of the Year, become ACT Young Australian of the Year, and shared the stage with world-renowned artists like Paramore and Lil Uzi Vert. In the process, he has undergone a metamorphosis of his own.
Black locs were cut to make way for a shaved head, a singular red stripe painted down the centre. Bare eyes made way for insect-esque black sunglasses that barely leave his face and the overarching colour scheme throughout his work became red and black. Like Gregor Samson, he changed. He became a vermin, or more specifically, the roach.
“It’s like the one thing that’s supposed to survive the nuclear war,” he says. “It’s a powerful little thing. I feel like it’s representative of humanity, and how stubborn and inspiring the will is to survive.”
The roach is a character that emerged in the various sold out shows performed next to the Sydney and Brisbane Symphony Orchestras earlier this year — a hulking personification of the pest that saw him sitting on the shoulders of his back-up dancers (who have come to be known as his goons) with black cloth draped over their bodies as they entered centre stage. Naturally, it also became the character at the centre of STRUGGLER.
Image: Genesis Owusu / Bec Parsons
“It’s essentially the same characters throughout the whole album. There’s the God character and the roach character. And the roach is called the roach because it’s not a thing that’s loved, it’s considered to be a pest. Its life isn’t valued. And when we as humans are at our lowest points, that can be how it feels, especially in the grand scheme of everything,” he says.
“So I just really related to what the book was talking about, which is where I came to write my own story, which was about a roach running and running, trying not to get stepped on by God.”
But God doesn’t necessarily represent the mythology of religion, he says (though, as a kid in Canberra, he was heavily involved in the church) — even though the album is full of religious, and at points almost Satanic, metaphors. Rather, they’re the uncontrollable forces that we deal with in an unpredictable world, whether that be the exploitative nature of late stage capitalism or COVID lockdowns.
They’re existentially weighty topics that have darkened the sonics of Genesis’ tracks on this second album. While his first sounded ironically cheerful with symbolically dark lyricism — mostly danceable numbers with thudding bass and catchy hooks — STRUGGLER makes way for a more explicitly down-tempo exploration. There are some quintessential funk-esque tracks — ‘The Old Man’, ‘Tied Up’ and ‘Stay Blessed’ — that have become synonymous with his high-energy, non-conforming sound (though many have labelled his works as anything between punk, pop, rap and alternative R&B). However, tracks like ‘The Roach’, ‘What Comes Will Come’ and, especially, ‘Stuck To The Fan’ see him embrace — both lyrically and genre-wise — a new introspective energy that, while still assimilating styles of jazz and funk, has him singing things like: ‘The bile in my chest was not for me/I can fuck myself fine just for free/Me, myself and I that’s the team’.
“The first album was supposed to be like that. It was almost ironically light. Smiling With No Teeth was like a fake smile. I’m talking about depression and racism but because of how I grew up in Australia, I could only talk about them if I sugar-coated them,” he says.
“I feel like this album is in reverse, where it sounds and feels dark. I wanted it to feel like that because I felt like that was accurate and authentic to how I was feeling and the times that we were living in.”
Searching For A Purpose
From the first track ‘Leaving The Light’, which highlights Genesis’ auteurist thudding synths, to the melancholy closer, ‘Stuck To The Fan’, the narrative arc is “about finding yourself finding purpose,” he says. At the start he’s running, he’s surviving. Into the middle, he’s been running so long he begins questioning why and by the end, on songs like Stay Blessed’, he realises there’s no point — “Maybe I’m just suffering for the sake of suffering,” he explains — so he begins to carve his own path and in doing so finds acceptance.
One of the most telling lyrics on the creation of the album comes on ‘What Comes Will Come’, where he sings “Busy making new trauma/So I got something to rap about/self-inflicted stabbing doubt”. Like any artist building out their discography, it relates to the pressures that come with trying to live up to preconceived standards set by the success of the first album.
“I felt like I poured a lot of myself into that album. And I was like, ‘Oh, shit, what am I going to say now?’,” he says.
“There was a lot of pressure. But I guess more so internally. I feel like I poured so much of my life experience into that album. And then it was time to make album two. The pressure for me was figuring out how to say something genuine and authentic and not just say something because I felt like I had to make a new product. So there was a lot of searching to figure out a new way to be inspired and a new inspiration to draw from. It was a soul-searching journey.”
Speed Dating In LA
One part of that journey involved constructing an interview list of LA producers. Unlike the path taken to create album one, where he revelled in improvisational mayhem alongside a room full of a dozen other artists, STRUGGLER instead saw him focus on the talents of foundational music-heads with years of experience in the industry.
“I was there for two months. Essentially doing producer speed dating,” he says. “Every day for two months. I’d get into a room with a different producer and we had five or six hours to know each other’s life story. It was very intense, especially in LA, because it’s a different beast over there. After that, I picked the people that I connected with the most. They got the second date, and we made more music. And that’s how the album was made essentially.”
It’s a hefty switch up from just a few years ago, when Genesis felt he had unlimited hours during COVID lockdowns to tinker with his sound and lyrics. “There was no distraction… but it made making this album harder, because rather than having all the time in the world, I had to find the time in between already being busy,” he says.
“But I guess that’s what most artists have to deal with anyway, and I just had a luxurious first go around. So I had to be welcome[d] to the real world.”
Image: Genesis Owusu / Bec Parsons
And as the album comes close to release, it’s obvious that the fatigue has set in. It’s no surprise, as he’s someone whose musical mindset circles the heavily symbolic and deeply thought out. That is in addition to the work that’s seen him become the muse of the Australian music industry for the past few years. Genesis has been busy, and inspiration doesn’t always hit when most needed. He jokes that in the future he’ll do an André 3000 and “just travel the world in some overalls playing the flute”.
It seems like that fatigue flows through the storyline of the album itself: the running and then the acceptance of the roach. Perhaps it symbolises the musical wheel that is the industry and the constant need for creation to get a slice of the pie at the end of the day (but that’s just an interpretation).
STRUGGLER serves as an impressive follow-up to Genesis’ world-beating debut album, introducing new funk-tinged tracks while also weaving in slower, more sorrowful and introspective themes. It’s obvious that like album one, he’s put a lot of himself into album two. It makes sense that for the future and album three:
“I’m gonna try and live some life first. And then hopefully, by the time I need to make album three, I’ll be rejuvenated and have a new mindset,” he says.
“Hopefully, I won’t need to make album three until I feel like I have something new to say.”
Genesis Owusu’s new album STRUGGLER is out now.
Julie Fenwick is a music and culture writer from Naarm/Melbourne. Follow her on Instagram @juliefenfen.
Image: Bec Parsons