Genesis Owusu shines on Redstar Wu & the Worldwide Scourge

Every Tuesday, the Sounding Board is a space for a short-ish review of a recent-ish release and conversations about new-to-you music. We’ll get things started with a write-up about a newer, likely under-heard album, and invite you to share your music musings in the comments.

There’s a line of thinking in the world of sports that once an athlete demonstrates a skill, they own that skill. 

If someone shows they can bash home runs, whip cross-court passes, run over would-be tacklers, or deke defenders on their way to the net, it’s necessary to acknowledge that it could happen again and the displayed talent should be considered an available tool. 

By this logic, Genesis Owusu is the music-making equivalent of a hardware store. The Ghanaian-Australian artist, born Kofi Owusu-Ansah, can plausibly do anything on mic and do it well. 

Whether he’s rapping, singing, waxing philosophic, raging against racism or making uneasy peace with the inherent unfairness of life, Owusu is excellent. He can double-time over a frenetic beat, lead a sing-along over a funky synth line, create mania while rocking out and even convincingly embrace a country-adjacent croon using his lower register. When performing live, he’s an obvious star, a throwback bandleader bursting with the kind of energy and off-the-charts charisma needed to blow crowds away. During a 2021 interview with the Guardian, Owusu  compared himself to Prince, and the consensus seemed to be “fair enough.” 

That staggering talent was readily apparent upon the release of his excellent and eclectic first album, 2021’s Smiling With No Teeth, which includes both a fiery rebuke of neo-Nazis and an interpolation of the Full House theme song. Owusu’s versatility and virtuosity were reinforced by the well-reviewed 2023 concept album, Struggler, which assumed the point of view of an indomitable cockroach. While still genre-agnostic, it toned down the stylistic swerves to emphasize post-punk tones. Redstar Wu & the Worldwide Scourge,¹ Owusu’s recently released third album, is varied, vibrant, loud, often angry and one of the year’s absolute best long-players. It’s a deft combination of the genre-hopping bombast of his debut, the darker, ‘80s influence of his sophomore album and au courant commentary.²

The attempt to bend topical third rails to Owusu’s melodic will is notable. While he didn’t shy away from grappling with loaded topics in his past work, they were generally addressed via big-picture abstractions, not ripped-from-the-headlines spleen venting.³ At points in his first two albums, Owusu skewered hateful ideologies, analyzed his own contradictory impulses and sought to contextualize his place in the world. These topics mingled with dismay over current affairs are Redstar Wu’s exclusive focus. This makes for an album that’s uniquely strident and reactionary within the Genesis Owusu discography. 

This is an asset and a liability. 

On one hand, it’s an animating spark that provides Redstar Wu with palpable urgency. When leavened with humor, like on early single, “Death Cult Zombie,” it turns a fiery screed into a bouncy earworm that both drenches memetic phrases in irony and coins clever original lines.⁴ On the other hand, the lyrics can veer into inelegant agitprop. Album-opener, “Pirate Radio,” exemplifies this pitfall with its reference to “toupeed totalitarians,” a corporate-sponsored Senate and by-name disses of the rapper formerly known as Kanye West and Elon Musk. Jeff Tiedrich’s Bluesky feed as a post-punk song feels trite, especially when Owusu shows a knack for observation, nuance and genuinely insightful critique elsewhere. 

“The Worldwide Scourge” unequivocally stakes out Owusu’s positions on violence in Gaza, income inequality, right-wing populism and rights for essentially any marginalized population. It also acknowledges both the hypocritical acts required to be a prosperous person in 2026 and that even the most seemingly black-and-white propositions include a whole lot of gray. It lands some memorable barbs such as “I ain’t above celebrating the death of an abuser/ I’ll mark his body black and blue till I make a Yakuza,” and imagines online false flag flamewars that turn no-brainer value propositions into viral arguments, but it’s primarily a clear-eyed rumination on doing your best within a messy, global reality.

“Situations,” which immediately follows scathing bop “Death Cult Zombie” and serves as a less antagonistic foil to that track, manages something similar to “The Worldwide Scourge.” It examines the addictive properties of outrage, considers how shared challenges might produce opposed political views and encourages solidarity among anyone who might feel powerless compared to yacht owners. It’s an earnest reflection on shared, wounded humanity and the universal need for dignity that is much more interesting than picking off low-hanging punchlines or going scorched-earth on straw men.

Musically, Redstar Wu is both more diverse and more consistent. It’s uniformly excellent, no matter what Owusu and multi-instrumentalist producer Dann Hume decide to do — and they do try out a decent array of styles, even if the balance leans heavily toward buzzy post-punk. The crowd-directing anthem, “Stampede,” and paranoid freakout, “Most Normal American Voter,” both technically stand under that large umbrella, but no one is going to confuse the overclocked pogoing of the former with the noise-rock textures of the latter. That’s indicative of a broader trend on the album.

No matter how many elements the post-punk-styled tracks on Redstar Wu share, they always have enough character to stay fresh, easily distinguishable and enjoyable. Sometimes the wrinkle is minor, like the rattlesnake 808s on “Life Keeps Going,” sometimes it’s a whole other voice, like on the pop-leaning “Falling Both Ways,” which makes great use of featured vocals from New Zealand Ladyhawke, but there’s always something.

There are also a handful of tracks that deviate significantly from the LP’s predominant sound. “Hellstar” mixes shimmering synths with a simmering groove and deploys a guest rapper, the unheralded American emcee Duckwrth, who neither adds nor subtracts with a perfectly fine verse.⁵ Conversely, the extra-funky guitar sting that strikes after Owusu raps “I don’t need to see you, girl, I know you by your taste” adds a preposterous amount of personality to the song in a matter of seconds.

“Blessed are the Meek” is a smooth song with a bass-heavy bounce contrasted and complemented by the soft twinkling of keys and a breathy, nearly falsetto hook. It’s one of a handful of tracks that gets a boost from extra vocals by KYE, a Zimbabwe-born, London-raised and Melbourne-based artist who’s worked with Owusu in the past.⁶ Owusu works magic with those ingredients, delivering his lyrics in a laguid, phonetically dense style reminiscent of Andre 3000.

“Big Dog” is a slice of glossy electronica without precedent on this or any other Genesis Owusu album. It includes a widdly-wah instrumental break that would fit in on a Ratatat album. It’s amusing, but it’s also the weakest track on Redstar Wu. Owusu’s tougher-than-usual delivery and the light backing beat never quite sync up, but they’re also not so incompatible that the disconnect seems like the point. It also suffers badly in comparison to the album’s other massive stylistic departure, “4Life.”

Over a spacious arrangement that sounds like the coordinated sighs of depressive robots, Owusu’s heavily manipulated voice recalls bygone days. It’s a deeply wistful, nostalgic song haunted by a profound longing to return to fondly remembered people, places and times. It’s a showstopping turn that seems to crib from both “Runaway” and Emerson, Lake & Palmer.⁷ It’s surprising how well it works. Or at least it should be.

On a Genesis Owusu album, it’d be more astounding if the big swing didn’t connect.

1. Released May 15 via Ourness, a boutique album with a small roster of rad Australian artists. Music Business Worldwide has a fascinating piece built around an interview with Ourness co-founder Andrew Klippel, who contributed keys and synthesizer to Redstar Wu & the Worldwide Scourge. ↩︎
2. If I were to rank Owusu’s albums — and I write a weekly music column, so I feel a strong compulsion to do so — I’d give Smiling with No Teeth a slight edge for the top spot. That puts Redstar Wu & the Worldwide Scourge in second and Struggler in third place by a fair margin. Struggler is a good album with a few tracks — “The Roach,” “Tied Up,” and “That’s Life (A Swamp)”— that stand up to Owusu’s best work, but the whole album sounds a little flat. In hindsight, it seems like a stepping-stone record. ↩︎
3. Owusu told Treble: “I feel like I have been a pretty political artist throughout my life along with being a very political person throughout my life as well, so it didn’t really feel like that much of a challenge for me. My first album [Smiling with No Teeth] was a concept around two black dogs with one representing depression and the other representing racism, and the singles before that, even though they were funky and jamming, I was talking about things like cultural appropriation.” ↩︎
4. “Can’t believe we let the whole world get turned by Hank Hill-looking motherfuckers/ Bobbies on the block till a Redcorn suffers,” is a great puncline in a verse that starts with a reference to U.K. politics. ↩︎
5. I apparently know Duckwrth from the Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse soundtrack. Maybe you do, too. ↩︎
6. What would The Sounding Board be without an NME link in the footnotes? ↩︎
7. Hume breaks out the Moog for this one. ↩︎