Genesis Owusu – ‘Struggler’ review: an artist at the top of his game

16 August, 2023

No longer an underdog, Genesis Owusu is growing into life as a bonafide star. ‘Struggler’, the second album from the Ghanaian-born, Canberra-based musician, is the work of an artist giving power to some of his most radical sonic ideas. Songs don’t often build to a crescendo, they begin there. He indulges in futurist leanings – including a recurring motif of apocalypse and unpredictable chord progressions – with a striking confidence, a move which suggests that he has found the freedom to explore every facet of his talent as a writer and vocalist.

READ MORE: Genesis Owusu: the show-stealing hero banging the drum for musical outsiders

Owusu’s debut ‘Smiling With No Teeth’, released in 2021, showed off his uninhibited approach to pop music – a thrilling, powerfully intense sprawl of smouldering angst with shards of bright instrumentation. The album soon became a sleeper hit in his native Australia: alongside sweeping the ARIA Awards, in the years that have followed, Owusu has gone on to headline a sold-out Sydney Opera House, tour US arenas with Paramore, and perform at the Bose and NME’s C23 live showcase at Austin’s SXSW. Yet the matter of survival amidst burgeoning success is central to ‘Struggler’, a direct response to Owusu’s newfound status as one of his country’s most in-demand musical prospects.

Largely inspired by Samuel Beckett’s 1953 tragicomedy Waiting for Godot, ‘Struggler’ centres on a short story Owusu penned about an invented character called The Roach: a restless figure navigating impending doom and environmental disaster. Over a low, vibrating hum of distortion, on the horror movie-esque ‘Old Man’, Owusu’s thoughts grow increasingly existential: “Everyday I wake up / Boy I’m battling Goliath.” ‘That’s Life (A Swamp)’, meanwhile, is a strange, scintillating disco shimmy, and ‘Tied Up’ pairs a spoken-word verse with a jagged bassline. Press play on ‘Balthazar’ and you’re met with a burst of ‘70s-style funk falsetto croons.

That’s a lot of moods for one album, but Owusu’s commitment to the narrative arc keeps ‘Struggler’ from losing focus. In this week’s NME cover story, the 25-year-old said that across these urgent and catchy songs, The Roach is “going through this whole mental crisis.” You can hear this in the riveting intensity of ‘Leaving The Light’s melee of electronics, or the punk thrash of ‘Stay Blessed’. Trauma and perseverance are markers of ‘What Comes Will Come’; the song’s latter half, however, evolves into a gorgeously gritty flow, bringing the clarity of Owusu’s storytelling into sharp relief. Much of ‘Struggler’ may be unsettled but it never feels restless.

By upholding references to The Roach, the lines between fantasy and reality frequently blur on ‘Struggler’. You get the sense, however, that Owusu is also interrogating his own personal mythology: he is no longer bound by the wounds of his past, but empowered by them.