Author: Josh Martin

NME

Genesis Owusu shuffles on stage, and he must be almost nine feet tall. He’s wearing sunglasses that look like the compound eyes of a fly. A red stripe slashes down the centre of his bald head – something he calls the Mark of the Roach (more on that later). Red gloved hands, reaching for his neck, are affixed to his shoulders. The looped, ascending beat of ‘The Other Black Dog’ begins as he disrobes to become human height and two of his “goons” – hype men in balaclavas – emerge.

This is how many of Genesis Owusu’s live shows have begun over the last year – an arresting introduction that signals a new era for the outsider artist. “When people see me [live] for the first time it’s like, ‘What the fuck? What the fuck? OK, that’s kind of cool. Oh shit! I like this one’,” he tells NME. “I enjoy that rollercoaster of emotion.”

The 25-year-old artist, born Kofi Owusu-Ansah, took his home country of Australia by storm in 2021 with the release of his debut album ‘Smiling With No Teeth’, a record that hinges on the weighty metaphor of two black dogs, one embodying depression and the other racism. Soundtracked by The Black Dog Band, a ramshackle group that could swerve from punk to funk to jazz to industrial rock, ‘Smiling With No Teeth’ was a striking statement on being an outcast, creatively and otherwise.

In the two years since its release, Owusu-Ansah has been anything but: dancing on stage at Madison Square Garden with Hayley Williams and Lil Uzi Vert, sweeping Australia’s national music awards, stealing the show at Bose and NME’s C23 live showcase at Austin’s SXSW, and headlining a sold-out Sydney Opera House backed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. It’s the last of those that has got him shaking his head. “I remember performing that night and being like, ‘Damn, this is so crazy. Where does it even go from here? What do I do next?’”

Owusu-Ansah is adjusting to life as the main character, and it hasn’t all been easy. He barely had time to process his newfound status before the calls started coming in for album number two. Whereas ‘Smiling With No Teeth’ was a “neat story” told at one go – “I could tell you which day we started and how long we jammed for” – the creation of ‘Struggler’ was a scramble for time between press and tour commitments.

Owusu-Ansah and The Black Dog Band made ‘Smiling With No Teeth’ in sweaty, hours-long jam sessions, but for ‘Struggler’ he underwent what he calls “producer speed dating”: going into different sessions with different producers in Los Angeles every day for two months.

Some of his dates were “fucking wacky”, Owusu-Ansah says. “They were like, ‘Alright, tell me your life story. OK, this, this, this? Let’s try this. Boom’… That was very much not the way I was used to working.”

Jason Evigan, whose credits include Britney Spears, Maroon 5 and Kelly Clarkson, was one of the “worthy bachelors” Owusu-Ansah connected with the most. “He heard a little sample, and imagined what it would sound like if he’d gone through the entire discography,” Owusu-Ansah says. “He was like, ‘Damn, this could sound really cool if it were going in some Nine Inch Nails direction’… He fused the two things: what he thought was going on versus what is actually going on.”

The resulting stylistic mix on ‘Struggler’, featuring multiple producers including Evigan, is as expansive as Owusu-Ansah has ever been – with diversions through pop punk (‘Stay Blessed’), jungle (‘What Comes Will Come’), and new wave (‘The Roach’). His voice has developed melodically, the back-of-the-throat vocal volleys evoking Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke, veering from a one-man-gang-shout to a falsetto croon. It’s remarkable then, that the record wasn’t inspired by music at all.

“I think I’d actually listened to the least amount of music that I’d listened to in my life, based off my Spotify Wrapped,” Owusu-Ansah laughs. “I’d been surrounded with music the most I had ever been in my life… I felt the least need to listen to it in my free time.”

Owusu-Ansah didn’t find purpose in music, but in pointlessness.

“We wait. We are bored. No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste.”

So says the character of Vladimir in Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy Waiting for Godot, an opaque, meandering play about two men who wait on a country road for a third that never arrives. The turmoil experienced by the characters – who stay put, their feverish dialogue rumbling along as their lack of purpose becomes ever clearer – inspired Owusu-Ansah to write his own short story about a character he called ‘The Roach’.

“The [Roach] is running pretty much the whole story. But as they’re running, they’re going through this whole mental crisis – ‘OK, I need to run to survive’. And then as they’re running: ‘Why do I really need to run? What’s the point of running? Is there a point? Oh, shit, maybe there’s not a point. Maybe I can figure out my own point’,” he explains. “The actual story is going on in the character’s head. And essentially, all they’re really doing is just trying to survive.”

That short story formed the bedrock of ‘Struggler’. The innumerable pressures we’ve all faced in the last few years – be it disease, disaster, poverty – amalgamate into a god figure who’s trying to smite the Roach as it runs: “There’s an old man in the sky, just waiting to fuck my life up,” Owusu-Ansah bellows on ‘Old Man’.

“This world just seems more and more confusing and chaotic as things go by,” he muses. “It feels like life closes in around you sometimes, especially when you’re at your lowest. That’s a big part of the character as well – the struggle of being at your lowest but still having to fight to the next day.”

The crises in the Roach’s mind are a journey through forsaken philosophies, beginning with survival, rolling through nihilism and existentialism, and then landing on the absurdist conclusion that there is no point – and that’s beautiful. Owusu-Ansah’s mantra for finding equilibrium in our reality coalesces around a biblical reference on the single ‘Tied Up’: “It’s Sodom and Gomorrah / Vogue, strike a pose”.

“One day, you might fucking burn down to ashes. But today, the sun has risen, and you get to spend time with your friends and, like, fuckin’ see a cute bird walk across the street. Like, that’s so awesome,” he says, giggling.

While running his own roach race, Owusu-Ansah spent less than 40 days over the last year in his hometown of Canberra. His family immigrated to Australia’s capital from Ghana when he was three years old and has lived there ever since. The seat of the country’s government, Canberra (and particularly the Catholic school Owusu-Ansah attended) is far less diverse and cosmopolitan than Sydney or Melbourne. But over time, Owusu-Ansah grew to embrace his individuality, expressing it in the way he dressed and the music he listened to.

Despite the scale of his recent success, he has refused to move to a bigger city, claiming Canberra allows him to “relax his shoulders” – vital, after a world tour that saw him tour the US with Paramore, rearrange his oddball beats with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and put his stamp on boutique European venues.

Genesis Owusu shows are bursts of costumed and choreographed spontaneity. He made national headlines when the dancefloor of the 115-year-old Enmore Theatre in Sydney collapsed during one of his gigs. Playing at Berghain, the Berlin nightclub infamous for its debauchery and ultra-selective entrance policy, Owusu-Ansah’s goons turned masochistic.

“One of my goons did three consecutive stage dives,” he recalls. “[He] cracked his head open on one of the foldback speakers. We’re playing ‘Black Dogs!’ at the time, and I just fucking amped him up. He just kept going, blood dripping all over his face. It was insane.”

But the energy Owusu-Ansah cultivates for his Goon Club is more than mere catharsis: he seeks to create a complete outsider artist program. In Sydney, Mongolian throat singer Bukhu opened his show, playing the horsehead fiddle and lulling the audience into harmonic stupor with his resonant voice. “I love being with people that are on a completely different wavelength to me, because it’s almost like through the differences we’re on the same wavelength,” Owusu-Ansah says.

Owusu-Ansah conceived much of ‘Smiling With No Teeth’s visual identity himself, but entrusted the aesthetic of ‘Struggler’ to New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana, whose influential multimedia work examines early encounters between Polynesians and European explorers.

Reihana’s music videos for ‘Leaving The Light’ and ‘Tied Up’ are oblique, science fiction conceptions of Owusu-Ansah as the Roach, his eyes hidden from sight by blindfolds or dark tumours that oscillate across his body. In the former, he’s running across a craggy interplanetary landscape, and in the latter he’s engaged in a boxing match with God.

“I was really inspired by those early Gorillaz music videos,” Owusu-Ansah explains. “Seeing those things as a kid and always wanting to know what the story was, but it being out of my grasp – having to play with it in my head until I could find a throughline.”

Both of Genesis Owusu’s albums have been high-concept, multimedia epic poems with meaning etched into every decision. If ‘Smiling With No Teeth’ was a raw and quasi-improvised beginning, on ‘Struggler’ he refines his narrative beyond memoir and into boundless semi-fiction. He’s a bonafide writer – and it leaves his music with no limits.

“I’ve realised that I am just a storyteller,” Owusu-Ansah says. “Through the years, the medium has just changed into how I tell that story. Right now, I’m telling the story through albums. Before that, I was telling the story through poetry. Before that, I was writing literal short stories. Before that, as a kid, I was just a fucking liar.”

Genesis Owusu’s new album ‘Struggler’ is out on August 18 via OURNESS. He tours the US, EU/UK and Australia from October – find more info here.

Listen to Genesis Owusu’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify and here on Apple Music

Writer: Josh Martin
Photographer: Bailey Howard
Styling: Genesis Owusu
Label: Ourness
Mgmt: Andrew Klippel

The post Genesis Owusu: the show-stealing hero banging the drum for musical outsiders appeared first on NME.

NME

There are a lot of people standing in what looks like Ruel Vincent van Djik’s bedroom. The 20-year-old popstar is sitting on a desk chair in the middle of an orange rug, while makeup artists fuss over his foppish blond hair and his manager hovers nearby. The room’s main fixture is a walnut wood bookcase, populated by a metronome, Ruel’s ARIA Awards, an Orange guitar amplifier and a Paul McCartney lyric book. The wallpaper features music icons like Elvis with their eyes taped over (to avoid being pinged for copyright).

“Is there anything more we can do to prove that we’re in my house?” Ruel asks.

Not much, it seems – a crew member holds up a photo of Ruel’s actual bedroom, confirming that the space we’re in is nigh-on identical. The replica room is in the middle of a gargantuan soundstage at Docklands Studios in Melbourne, and takes up a fraction of the space – Hollywood film productions that shoot here often transform it to its very corners, but Ruel wants the soundstage to eventually become apparent. He and longtime creative director Jeremy Koren, known as Grey Ghost, have two days to shoot all the visuals for his debut album ‘4th Wall’. In the pre-recorded album announcement stream, one of the walls of this room is going to fall down to literally break the fourth wall. The wunderkind wants the world to know who he really is.

NME first speaks to Ruel in his alabaster white dressing room while he gets made up – the only quiet time he would have for the next 48 hours. He’s basketballer height, sporting the kind of drip that wouldn’t look out of place at NBA season opening night. Koren walks in and out to confer on various outfits for the day: Mason’s or Louis Vuitton?

“This makeup routine is going to take six hours. Explaining the album will also take six hours,” Ruel jokes.

‘4th Wall’ (its title stylised emphatically in all caps) is inspired by scenes from Ruel’s favourite films – primarily The Truman Show and Fight Club. The singer watched them for the first time on a plane on the way to a writing trip in Bali, and was so excited he watched them again on arrival. (Ruel even tried and failed to get Jim Carrey to narrate the album.) ‘4th Wall’ imagines Ruel finding out his entire life is a lie, being filmed for someone else’s entertainment.

“You run out of the soundstage, you get in the car and you start driving through country roads, just trying to get out of wherever you are. And then in that drive, all the album’s songs are playing on the radio,” he explains.

Ruel has not lived an ordinary life since his father, an ad agency owner, sent a demo of him aged 12 covering James Bay’s ‘Let It Go’ to his future manager, who then passed it on to his future producer M-Phazes. In the succeeding years, Ruel has toured the world multiple times over, released three EPs, won ARIA Awards, and built a global fan base that knows the words to all of his songs.

If that sounds overwhelming for a teenager, it is.

“I kind of disassociate myself from the things I do on tour,” Ruel admits. “If I’m talking to fans, I try to take myself out of it. I see it as another character, just to not drive myself crazy. And that feeling is quite similar to what I’m trying to convey on this concept.”

Did he feel trapped in the life he’d chosen before he was even an adult?

“I was still really enjoying every part; I’m not saying I was trapped. But it was definitely hard to know what I actually wanted,” Ruel says, sipping an energy drink between some facial hair trims.

“When COVID hit, I was back home [in Sydney] and doing what I would do if I was a regular teenager. I was with my friends, not really doing music. I went to Schoolies with a bunch of my mates, that was amazing. I had a full detox break and it gave me a different perspective on everything.”

Ruel’s reconciliation with his adolescence is reflected in 2021 single ‘GROWING UP IS _____’: “Sleep with friends, break a heart / Question everything you thought / Split a pill, smoke a dart / Growin’ up is weird / Fall in love for a year, and then I disappear”. Ruel reconnected with his love of sport, signing up to basketball and soccer leagues. (“There’s no escape like pelting a ball.”) He also had the time to make music on his own terms, without being surrounded by co-writers and constricted by deadlines.

“It was Jeff Buckley-like, ‘Sketches [For My Sweetheart The Drunk]’-inspired, kind of Phoebe Bridgers, Elliott Smith. It was very fucking sad – me on guitar and finding the saddest chords I could find and then whining over them for 45 minutes,” Ruel says, more than a little self-deprecating.

It was enough material for an entire album, one he hopes to put out one day, but “a little too raw”. Once COVID restrictions eased, Ruel shuttled off to write most of ‘4th Wall’ in Los Angeles with a new philosophy.

“When I was writing the first two EPs, I would go into sessions and sit back and just say yes to every other idea. I’d let the session flow a little too easily, to make it easier for everyone else and to not hurt anyone’s feelings,” he explains. “But then when I went back to LA, I turned into a full studio prick… it was good for music but I feel I was less enjoyable to write with.”

“I tried to make every song something that I hadn’t heard before”

He also developed new preferences: Ruel grew to resent the high-gloss beats that made him famous on early hit singles ‘Painkiller’ and ‘Dazed & Confused’. “I kind of hate writing R&B songs now… when I write a song like that, with those chords and melodies, I cringe,” he says.

That might seem like a problem, considering M-Phazes, Ruel’s producer for his entire career so far, has made his entire body of work in that vein. But Ruel says Phazes’ work with Noah Cyrus and her Nashville country lane made the producer open to new forms. Ruel and M-Phazes’ production touchstones became the power pop of Weezer, and the “classic songwriting” of Jeff Buckley and the Beatles.

The new Ruel sound debuts for a crowd on day two of the shoot. NME walks in to a drastically different set – a retro Saab convertible has been “crashed” into a tall sky blue curtain, at the back of a forest filled with plastic jurassic ferns and tissue paper leaves. Smoke pours into the car from a white hose. A producer says it barely goes over 15 kilometres an hour, the right indicator doesn’t work, and they can’t leave the headlights on for long without the battery dying. They still have to return it to someone off Facebook Marketplace by the end of the day.

Ruel stands at the front of the set. He’s there to record an acoustic version of ‘End Scene’, the final song on the album, but we’re running an hour behind schedule. That leaves him only 10 minutes to play the actual music.

‘End Scene’ begins with wispy chords and hushed vocals, before bursting into a raspy, tremulous chorus. “I still remember, who we were, who we were, there’s blood on your sweater, I can’t get up… When did we stop giving a fuck about losing our minds? Remember I jumped out of the car to prove I was alive”.

The high notes prove troublesome to summon on demand – “Fuck my voice!” Ruel mutters – but everyone on set falls silent at the intensity of the emotion. It ends with a falsetto howl that Black Francis would be proud of.

The next day over breakfast in Fitzroy, Ruel explains away the bleakness of the lyrics as an analogue for the climax of Fight Club.

“It’s two people realising it’s the end of something and they’ve felt like they’ve lost their ways of being fun, they stopped enjoying being bad. It’s Bonnie and Clyde,” he says. “They’ve stopped enjoying committing crime and now they’re just like, ‘What the fuck happened to us? We saw a beautiful end but this is just fucking depressing’.”

“If I’m talking to fans, I try to take myself out of it. I see it as another character, just to not drive myself crazy”

The studio cut is just as sparse – no drums, just a squirming mono-synth line that flits in and out. It’s markedly different from the first three singles ‘SOMEONE ELSE’S PROBLEM’, ‘YOU AGAINST YOURSELF’ and ‘GROWING UP IS _____’, which you could be forgiven for thinking were Ruel-as-usual.

“I didn’t want to come out the gates with some full art wank… and isolate my fans like that,” he says. “I wanted to bridge the gap a little bit, which was why I chose those singles. But the album as a whole is the sound I’m working towards.”

The last draft of ‘4th Wall’ NME hears manages to turn sorrowful singer-songwriter, balls-to-the-wall rock, and even country music into a coherent mix. Acoustic guitar, fuzz bass and piano – courtesy of “the craziest L.A. players” M-Phazes could get – have turfed out samples and Ableton presets as Ruel’s instrumental constants.

The Phoebe Bridgers and Elliot Smith spirit of Ruel’s bedroom pandemic record lives on in its hi-fi big brother. In fact, Ruel went as far as writing songs with Bridgers collaborator Ethan Gruska and playing a rubber bridge guitar that can be heard on her album ‘Punisher’.

The songs on ‘4th Wall’ are forlorn, bitter and angry – with little sign of the bright eyes the young singer has flashed at the world so far. Ruel was determined not to let the studio and the growing pool of people working on the record totally distance it from its melancholic roots.

“I want people to see the mindset I had while writing it,” he says.

“I wrote a lot of really sad songs. And then I was like, OK, how can I find a different energy that [still] isn’t happy? I found using the emotion of anger was a cooler way of getting more energy and making it still feel like you can have a good time to it.”

The film references which inspired the album’s concept also awoke in Ruel a more expansive method of songwriting. Working on one track, he envisioned it as the score for a movie that didn’t exist – a three-act composition that surprises you at every turn. “Cinematic was the word,” he puts it.

“I want people to feel like at least one of the songs made them think of something in a different way. Because I tried to make every song something that I hadn’t heard before.”

Ruel didn’t grow up thinking he would be a musician – not that he had time to grow up before making that decision at 14.

“I was trying as hard [at music] as I was making it into the first basketball team,” he says. “I was probably even more committed to being an athlete… but soon as that opportunity [to do music] came around, I was like, fuck, I’m not gonna let this slide.”

Ruel only picked up the guitar for the first time at 11, attending School of Rock camps which taught him (reluctantly) how to play Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ in full. That was enough to start busking at the Manly Corso, a busy pedestrian mall, which he says killed his stage fright.

“There was so much competition between other 14-year-old blond surfer dudes with a guitar,” Ruel recalls. “One guy would always show up at the same time as me, and we’d have a Mexican standoff over who was going to get the best spot. We made a lot of money off tourists getting off the ferry!”

Once the buzz over Ruel’s voice in the M-Phazes track ‘Golden Years’ began, his parents and management worked to protect him from media scrutiny. Ruel’s face wasn’t made public for the first year of his musical career, until he was carefully unveiled with M-Phazes’ appearance in Like A Version.

“Every decision from a 14-year-old should be second-guessed. Every single one,” Ruel says now. “I was looking a lot at my parents, because I knew they would not put me into something that they thought would be dangerous for me. And they kept me in school, obviously, until I felt old enough to be like, ‘No, I don’t actually need this anymore’.”

Seven years later, Ruel is a veteran of the music industry at age 20. He’s matured at warp speed, and finds it difficult not to get ahead of himself occasionally. During the pandemic, he almost bought a house “because everyone was doing it”.

“I just gave up because it was too hard. Looking back at it now, I would have lost so much fucking money,” Ruel laughs. “I don’t set myself goals ever. I just do everything when it comes and feels right.”

And Ruel is sharpening his instincts on when to say no.

“I think I’ll always write. Performing? I probably won’t be touring for the rest of my life”

“[Moving to] Los Angeles would be massively beneficial,” he acknowledges. “Everytime I go there, stuff happens for me – I end up in the studio with Brockhampton or Khalid. But I would just hate to do that. That would be putting my career over my mental health.”

He can even see himself quitting touring, à la the Fab Four in the late ’60s, albeit well into the future.

“I think I’ll always write. Performing? I probably won’t be touring for the rest of my life. I think that I might have a limit to that maybe, in my 30s. I feel like that part of it is a really tough lifestyle,” Ruel muses.

Despite a myriad of tours ahead, the only thing Ruel wants to focus on right now is ‘4th Wall’. The young star still believes in the intrinsic importance of a debut album as an artist’s manifesto. Ruel wrote and rewrote most of the songs on the record three or four times, put them on the tracklist, took them off and then put them back on again.

“Some of [the singles] didn’t feel super in line with where they ended up. I don’t know if I was trying to please someone else or myself,” Ruel says. “I’ve been working on the album for what feels like three years now. And I’m 20 now so that’s a solid chunk of my life.”

“I’ve had three different finished albums that I’ve had to either start again or go back to LA and write a bunch more singles… for reasons. It’s been incredibly frustrating to be honest, but I’m so stoked that there’s an end in sight, because I’ve never come this close.”

Multiple people wander into the dressing room.

“How much longer do you need? Ruel is required,” an assistant says.

Ruel smooths his hair back, crunches a Red Bull can and dunks it into a bin.

“Showtime.”

Ruel’s ‘4th Wall’ is out March 3 via Recess Records/RCA Records

CREDITS

Photo assistance: Jade Florence
Hair and makeup: Nadine Muller
Styling: Grey Ghost
Outfits: Masons, Story mfg and HAVN

The post Ruel: “I don’t set myself goals ever. I just do everything when it comes and feels right” appeared first on NME.