GENESIS OWUSU: ON THE OTHER SIDE OF CHAOS

Vasili Papathanasopoulos
4 hours ago
18 min read

Updated: 2 hours ago

SEPTEMBER 2026

Photographs by Vasili Papathanasopoulos.

Styling by Joshua Obisanya.

Genesis Owusu is an artist in constant transformation. Throughout his cover shoot with MILKY, he has moved through textural, angular outfits and jewellery, dramatic silhouettes and a striking makeup design that transforms his face into something almost otherworldly. The scale of that direction matches the scale of the man: onstage and in front of a camera, Owusu has a presence that feels larger than the room he occupies, a physical intensity that has become inseparable from his artistry. Now, the shoot is over, he sits across from me in a hoodie as he prepares to head to the airport. The theatricality is gone, replaced by a calmness that carries through his answers. He considers each question carefully, laughs often and speaks with the same conviction that exists in his music.

Owusu’s third studio album, REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE, itself is built around a tension between scale and intimacy. It is a record concerned with the state of the world: the rise of the far right, economic inequality, misinformation, culture wars and the forces that encourage ordinary people to see one another as foes rather than friends. Yet the deeper you get into it, the more the record begins to sound like an argument for something remarkably simple: look after the people around you. “I am not your enemy, you are not my enemy, we have bigger fish to fry,” he says, distilling the records central frustration into a line that feels both politically urgent and deeply human.

The anger is unmistakable, but there is something else underneath it. The album is not simply a catalogue of everything Owusu thinks is wrong; it is an attempt to redirect attention towards the things that might actually matter. “It's about the world being on fire,” he declares. “Right wing, super far right weirdos taking over the world and super, super huge rich people and corporations pitting against regular people as each other's enemies through superficial culture wars and shit that doesn't really mean anything in the long run.” He describes the record as an attempt to cut through those distractions, “trying to yell in people's faces; don't get so distracted. Shit is on fire and we need to make a line to carry the buckets of water, you know, to put out the fire.”

It would be easy for a record this politically charged to become weighed down by its own seriousness. REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE avoids that trap largely because Owusu is too engrossed in the music to allow the message to consume the medium. The record is restless, funny, aggressive, vulnerable, strange and joyous. Its ideas are heavy, but its sound refuses to sit still, moving through a deliberately expansive sonic world that demonstrates just how much he has grown as an artist.

Top, Zero Meaning. Pants, KOURH. Boots, Rick Owens. Scarf, Zero Meaning. Jewellery, Artists Own. Sunglasses, Canrae.

Owusu has always been an artist who treats genre as a suggestion rather than a boundary, but there is a particular confidence to the way those instincts operate here. Punk can give way to R&B; hip-hop can collide with electronic textures; funk, soul and pop sensibilities can occupy the same space without the album ever feeling like it is simply ticking boxes on a list of influences. “I think that's something that also comes very naturally to me because I've just always loved all kinds of music all of my life. Genre has never really been a thing that I focus on,” he tells me. “Because I've soaked in all of these sounds from such a young age, it's kind of like when I open my mouth to make a song and I'm angry, it'll come out as punk music. Or if I open my mouth to make a song and I'm feeling sexy, it'll come out as R&B or neo soul.” The music follows the emotional temperature of the writing. On a record where the mood can shift from political fury to apathy, paranoia, tenderness and celebration, the sonic world needs to be equally elastic. “Being my third album, it was kind of like, what haven't I touched yet? Or what can I explore further? Or how can I just make sure I'm not boxed in, in any way?,” he says. “Throwing all this random shit at the wall and seeing what's stuck, which is just the funnest way to make art.” That might sound like a casual description of the process, but it reveals something important about how seriously he takes the freedom to experiment. The albums ambition doesn’t come from trying to make a grand statement about his own artistry. It comes from remaining curious enough to keep looking for what is next, and that curiosity is part of what makes the record feel like genuine artistic growth rather than simply a continuation of a successful formula. The result is an album that can hold its political ideas embedded with experimentation, humour, vulnerability and an obvious love of music itself.

Owusu’s previous albums built intricate worlds around their ideas, using metaphor and character to explore racism, depression, capitalism and the pressures of contemporary life. REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE retains the imaginative instinct but changes the distance between the artist and the subject. “I think every time I come to the point of making a new body of work, I try to look at the world or myself from a different perspective,” he admits. “So it's like, not so much as like reaching the next level in a kind of staircase type vibe, but more like if life is a cube [laughs] - first I looked at it from this left angle, now I'm gonna look at it from this right angle, you know?” It’s a deceptively simple metaphor for an artist whose work has always been concerned with perspective. Owusu doesn’t see growth as abandoning what came before. He sees it as finding another angle from which to look at the same complicated object.

On this album, that new angle is forthright. “I think the way this differs from my other albums is in its directness. I think my other albums are very fantastical, very metaphorical. Whereas this one is cut through, straight to the point.” For an artist who loves ambiguity, that decision required restraint. The temptation to wrap an idea in another layer of metaphor would have been easy to indulge. Instead, he deliberately pushed himself towards clarity, even when it meant resisting some of his favourite creative instincts. “I love the metaphors. I love the narratives, and I love ambiguity. But I felt like this was the time to make things as direct as possible.” This is heard in the albums willingness to name things plainly, including the people and structures Owusu believes deserve scrutiny, “Elon’s a fucking weirdo,” he says with a laugh, before explaining just how difficult the process of stripping away his usual layers could be. “I kind of had to like slap myself in the face a few times. Just cut the bullshit and say it how it is. That was the difficult part for me. But I think I got there.” He certainly did, and created an album that manages to be more direct without becoming less sophisticated. There’s no concealment behind metaphors, which means the words carry their own weight. The album trusts the listener enough to let its ideas land without cushioning them.

Shirt, Jeff Banks. Suit, Archive. Bag, Rabanne. Jewellery, Artists Own. Shoes, Artists Own. Sunglasses, Rowland Vision.

This confidence is particularly evident in the way the album moves between the personal and the global. Owusu is talking about enormous forces, but he is wary of speaking on behalf of everybody. “I kind of feel like I've learned through making music that when I speak personally and when I am just speaking for myself, that always seems to resonate with the most amount of people instead of trying to speak for other people or speak in any other person's experience.” It is one of the most revealing things he says about his growth as a songwriter. The more personally he speaks, the further the songs can travel. Rather than trying to construct a universal voice, he has become more comfortable with his own - which might explain why the records global perspective never feels detached from human experience. The concerns are enormous. But the album repeatedly returns to the experiences that make those larger questions tangible: friendship, love, anger, partying and community. The album was written over the past few years, when the news cycle seemed to offer an endless stream of reasons to become overwhelmed, and Owusu remembers that period as one in which people were struggling not only to understand what was happening, but to find the language to respond to it. His answer was to remove the filter.

That impulse becomes especially potent on the albums central political songs (Pirate Radio, Stampede, Blessed Are The Meek and Most Normal American Voter to name a few), where he addresses the ways economic anxiety and social instability can be redirected towards convenient targets. Whilst the album could have allowed the listener to become comfortably distant from the problem, Owusu puts the responsibility back in front of them: if people are being encouraged to fight one another, who benefits from that fight? His frustration is not abstract. It comes from watching people experiencing many of the same pressures turn those pressures against each other. He returns to that same phrase, “I am not your enemy, you are not my enemy, we have bigger fish to fry.” The sentiment runs through much of the record, however Owusu doesn’t present solidarity as something that requires everyone to think the same way. His understanding of community is more open-ended than that, built around people being willing to listen, speak their minds and challenge one another. “I think I've built a community of open-minded people. I've built a community of people who keep each other and myself in check. It's not just a bunch of yes men and women, like people who speak their mind, people who think about the world. It's a constant journey of having people around you that help you grow into the person that you should be, I guess.”

Owusu has collaborated with artists whose approaches are different from his own, not because they need to become indistinguishable, but because the friction between different worlds can create something neither could make alone. His new collaboration with Contact Sports on Attention Economics came from that recognition. Contact Sports was exploring algorithms, disconnection and questions around reality through an electronic soundscape, while Owusu had been thinking through similar anxieties from a differing musical and visual perspective. “She was kind of exploring the same things that I was exploring, but in a completely electronic world and all her stuff in this album is about algorithms and our disconnect from reality in a sense, or what reality is - just through a completely different soundscape and visual identity,” he says. “So I thought it was cool to collide the two worlds kind of talking about a similar thing, but through different avenues.” Even the way the video was made becomes a small demonstration of the contradictions of modern life. Owusu recorded his parts at home while Contact Sports was on the other side of the world. “Oh, it was super easy,” he says laughing. "All of my parts I did at home [laughs]. Like it was in my living room, my backyard, and under my house. It was fun. It was really cool being able to connect and work once again with an artist on the other side of the world. Being interconnected without having to be right there. It's one of the pluses of this day and age.”

For an album concerned with the destructive possibilities of technology, it is telling that Owusu doesn’t dismiss technology itself. The same systems that can amplify misinformation and alienation can also allow artists to create things together across continents. The problem is not simply the existence of connection, but what we do with it. His visual approach to REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE expands that idea beyond the music, with visuals filmed across Australia, Ghana and Paris. “I wanted that to be the case because the album is called REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE. I wanted to highlight that these things that I'm talking about are not just issues in Australia, they're not just issues in America or the UK. This is a global phenomenon.” The scale of that ambition could easily have turned the album into something impersonal. Instead, it brought him back to Ghana. For the first time in eleven years, Owusu returned to his home country to shoot the video for STAMPEDE. The experience allowed the global concerns of the record to intersect with his own history, giving the visual world another layer of meaning. “I wanted to be all over the globe and be in communities all over the globe to highlight things that are different, but more so things that are the same.”

Jacket, 14th Addiction. Top, Zero Meaning. Pants, Rick Owens. Belt, Rabanne. Earrings, Rabanne. Bracelet, Gucci. Rings, Artists Own. Shoes, Artists Own.

He then describes what returning home meant to him: “Being able to go back to my own home country, especially for the first time in eleven years, it was really special to be able to unearth and discover not just the world, but more of myself through discovering more of my home country.” There is something revealing in the fact that an album so preoccupied with the scale of the world ultimately brought Owusu back to a place that is deeply personal. The global perspective of the record is not detached or abstract; it is filtered through his own history, memories and sense of belonging.

For Owusu, hip-hop was where he first understood that music could be more than entertainment “I kind of feel like I've learned through making music that when I speak personally and when I am just speaking for myself, that always seems to resonate with the most amount of people rather than trying to speak for other people or speak in any other person's experience… The reason I choose to speak through music is because of hip-hop,” he says. “Some of my first hip-hop artists were Public Enemy or NWA or Lupe Fiasco, who used their music to speak in the same way I'm doing. They are the ones who taught me to do this.” Those artists showed him that music could be a tool for communicating directly to people, reflecting the world back at them and making sense of experiences that might otherwise remain private. “It was like this is a tool to speak and that's what made me gravitate to it more than anything.”

That lineage is audible on REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE, but the record doesn’t feel trapped by its influences. If anything, Owusu has become more confident in taking those lessons and making them his own. The albums political anger sits alongside an enormous amount of musical playfulness, and that contrast is one of its great strengths. There are moments where he sounds furious, moments when he sounds exhausted, moments where he sounds humorous and moments when the album strips everything back. The softer passages are not diversions from the records political argument. They are reminders of the human lives underneath it.

The album also makes room for the more intimate consequences of living in an unstable world. Owusu is interested not only in what people do collectively, but in what remains important on an individual level: relationships, love, friendship and the limited time we have with one another. That tension gives the record some of its emotional depth. Its concerns are enormous, but the stakes are ultimately personal. What kind of life do we want to have, and what are we trying to preserve when we talk about making the world better?

Owusu’s answer isn’t simply about survival. He wants people to have the opportunity to live fully, and that includes the right to experience joy. This becomes particularly important in the way he approaches the live show. The albums political concerns could easily have resulted in something relentlessly bleak, but he leans towards the idea that fighting for a better world also means fighting for the right to enjoy that world. “Club Style Wu, like I said about the live show, is about having something to say, but it is also about community and it's also about having a reason to fight. We focus on the fight itself.” He is quick to clarify what that fight is ultimately for. “We're fighting to have the opportunity to have a comfortable, dignified, and fun and happy and joyous life. So it's putting that at the forefront as well. We're fighting for our right to party as well, you know, have fun.” Here, he reveals the emotional centre beneath the albums anger. A better world isn’t simply one in which people have survived. It is one in which they can actually experience happiness, connection and freedom.

Top, Zero Meaning. Pants, KOURH. Boots, Rick Owens. Scarf, Zero Meaning. Jewellery, Artists Own. Sunglasses, Canrae.

With the albums attention on forces that operate on a global scale, Owusu’s own response to feeling overwhelmed by the size of those problems is surprisingly grounded. He doesn’t believe people need to understand everything before they can begin doing something. “I think just start in your own backyard. Start with how you feel. Talk to friends, family, strangers, very close geographically around you.” His point isn’t that people should stop paying attention to what is happening elsewhere, but that awareness needs somewhere tangible to go. “It's so important to be aware of things going around the globe, especially because we are so connected in this internet age. But at the same time, being in Australia, you hear these atrocities happening on the other side of the world and you can't really do a lot of tangible things” The answer, for Owusu, is to recognise that distance doesn’t mean disconnection. Small actions within a community can still contribute to something much larger, particularly when enough people decide to act where they are able. “But you have to realise that so many things are interconnected, and if you can start the smallest step in your community - if everyone were to do that, then those small steps build up and eventually add up to a big change. It's like when you don't know what to do, you just do what you can.”

The albums growth as a piece of songwriting is ultimately what allows all of these ideas to coexist without becoming unwieldy. Owusu has always had an instinct for creating expansive musical worlds, but REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE shows a greater understanding of when to let an idea stand on its own. There is considerable care beneath the records simmering chaos. Its experimentation never feels like decoration, and its directness never feels like a lack of imagination. Instead, the two reveal an artist becoming increasingly confident in knowing exactly what each song needs to be. "I wouldn't put something out, especially a body of work that I don't love and adore. No outside influence would ever change that.” The conviction is simple, but it speaks to the care behind the album. The strange turns and unexpected shifts aren’t there simply to demonstrate what he can do; they serve the songs themselves.

The same instinct to follow a song where it wants to go can be heard in the decision to release Human Again separately. The track came from the same recording period as REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE, but Owusu felt it didn’t quite belong within the albums world the way other songs did. Rather than forcing it into the record, he allowed it to exist independently. “That came in the same era or recording processes as THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE. I felt like it didn't quite fit as concisely as I wanted it to, but I still thought it was a banger - so I still wanted to release it.” After spending so much time thinking about the album as a complete world, Owusu is still able to recognise when a song deserves to live outside of it. The larger concept matters, but so does the simple pleasure of making something that works. The songs music video extends that instinct into something more playful. Filmed a few hours from Paris in a seventeenth-century château, the visual moves between the French Revolution and present day, connecting historical resistance to contemporary struggles without treating the past as something distant or untouchable. Owusu wanted the visual to acknowledge that the forces people are fighting now are not necessarily new; history is full of moments when ordinary people have challenged systems that seemed impossible to overcome. Yet even within that idea, there is room for absurdity and celebration. "We harken back to the French Revolution and people deposing their corrupt overlords essentially, with cuts back in and out of that era to modernity, while also just making it a party as well.” The setting becomes a place to make a political point, but also somewhere to throw a party.

By the time the record reached the stage, the songs were no longer fixed entities. Owusu had already demonstrated that with Club Star Wu, where the material was reworked within a week and given another life in front of an audience. The compressed timeframe appealed to him because it left little room for overthinking. “I kinda fuck with having a time limit as well [laughs]. We just do what we do, and if they fuck with it, they fuck with it. If they don't, they don't. But it always works out.” The result was another version of the songs, shaped by the particular conditions of the room and the people in it.

Shirt, Jeff Banks. Suit, Archive. Bag, Rabanne. Jewellery, Artists Own. Shoes, Artists Own. Sunglasses, Rowland Vision.

The live environment is an extension of that experimentation, but it is also where Owusu’s idea of community becomes tangible. He isn’t interested in simply recreating the album onstage; he wants to create a setting with its own identity and energy. “Just trying to make the visual identity and feel in the room about community. I kind of wanted it to feel like an underground rave meets block party meets pirate radio station.” The name the tour becomes part of that concept, giving people a role beyond simply watching the person onstage. “It's called the Pirate Radio Tour because it is the tour where like-minded and not like-minded people can come into a space and we literally have the platform and the microphone to say whatever we want to say; things that have been censored by mainstream legacy media and whatnot. This is our space, this is our community. That's kind of how I want it to feel.”

For Owusu, however, the live show is about more than experimentation. It is where the distance between artist and audience disappears. “It's the most important part, especially all of these things that I'm talking about in the album. I'm not just talking about it to make music. I'm talking about it because I care about it and then I just decided to make music about it.” His career took shape during the COVID era, when much of that relationship was experienced through screens. “My career kind of became real in the COVID era. So I was very used to only receiving the love and the hate through a screen. So the live show kind of became one of the only avenues of really connecting with people.” The importance of the stage, then, isn’t simply about translating the record into a bigger sound. It is about creating the physical connection that screens could never provide.

Days after our conversation, Owusu was in Griffith for Triple J’s One Night Stand. From there, the album will move through festival appearances including Yours & Owls, a Hobart show, a sold-out North American tour and a European run. The scale will change dramatically from the quiet studio where we sit talking, but the underlying idea remains the same. The album began with Owusu trying to make sense of a world that felt increasingly difficult to comprehend; its next life is in spaces where other people can make sense of it alongside him.

The response to REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE suggests those rooms are waiting with anticipation. The album debuted at number one on the Australian Albums Chart and has earned him a nomination for the Australian Music Prize, whilst STAMPEDE has received a nomination at the 2026 Independent Music Awards in the UK. Those achievements offer an external measure of the records impact, both in critical and commercial recognition, but they are particularly significant because of how much the album asks of its audience. It asks listeners to sit with the contradictions of the present whilst giving them something vibrant enough to return to. Owusu’s own relationship with the record has remained remarkably steady amidst everything that has happened since its release. "I think the way I feel about it is the same personally. I think that's kind of just how I operate in music.” None of those things changed what the record meant to him when he made it, nor have they changed the standard he holds it to.

What has changed, or at least what has been confirmed, is the knowledge that the work has travelled beyond the person who made it. “It is a great feeling to know that it has resonated with people and that the songs and the lyrics mean something to so many people. I kind of felt like that would be the case.” It is a fitting outcome for an album so concerned with connection.

Jacket, 14th Addiction. Top, Zero Meaning. Pants, Rick Owens. Belt, Rabanne. Earrings, Rabanne. Bracelet, Gucci. Rings, Artists Own. Shoes, Artists Own.

The achievement of REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE is not simply that it has something to say, but that Owusu has found a way to let those ideas exist without overwhelming the music that unfurls around them. The directness he demanded from himself hasn’t diminished the imagination that has always defined his work. If anything, it has given that imagination more freedom. The album can be strange, loud, funny, beautiful and confrontational without needing to explain every contradiction. There is a generosity in that confidence. Owusu isn’t making music to demonstrate that he has figured everything out. He is making it because he is curious, because he cares and because music has always been the place where those two things can meet.

Looking back across his discography, the evolution is less about becoming a completely different artist than becoming more fully himself. The theatricality remains. So does the appetite for genre, the instinct for world-building and the willingness to take creative risks. What has changed is the distance between Owusu and what he outright wants to say. Over the coming months he will be standing in front of thousands of people each night, and the scale will return. The songs will become louder, the visuals more immersive and the audience will become more entrenched in the world he has spent so long constructing. But sitting across from him now, listening to him talk about music, community, and the reasons he keeps making art, the ambition of the album feels less like a grand statement and more like an extension of a very simple impulse: to make something he believes in, and then see how it lives on.

There is no neat resolution waiting at the end of REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE, and Owusu doesn’t pretend there should be. The world remains complicated. The problems he is writing about remain enormous. What he offers instead is a way of moving through that uncertainty: stay curious, stay connected, pay attention to the people around you, make something and don’t lose sight of the life you’re trying to protect in the first place.

Then there is the next side quest. After spending so much time confronting the chaos of the world through music, Owusu has something considerably more practical in mind. “I was supposed to learn survival skills, like wildlife survival skills, but I haven't got to it yet. So I think that's my next one.” It is an unexpectedly perfect final note. Genesis Owusu has used REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE as a tool to navigate an increasingly strange and difficult world together. Now, it seems, he’s going to learn how to survive it in the wild.

https://youtu.be/blGxyD0PoBE