Now this is how you do a debut album — loud, confident, and wonderfully chaotic.
Genesis Owusu’s first album didn’t make much much of a dent on the ARIA Albums Chart, scraping into the top 30 at No. 27, but its impact was felt in a major way elsewhere.
Owusu and Smiling with No Teeth were the clear winners at the 2021 ARIA Awards, scooping gongs for Album of the Year, Best Hip Hop Release, and Best Independent Release, and Producer of the Year (Andrew Klippel and Dave Hammer). At our Rolling Stone Australia Awards the following year, Owusu’s debut won Best Record in a tough category featuring heavyweights like Amy Shark, Crowded House, and Tash Sultana.
Purportedly a hip-hop album, Smiling with No Teeth found Owusu journeying dizzyingly through jazz, rap, and soul, whatever genre he fancied exploring.
Critics lapped up Owusu’s album’s diversity, with it appearing on multiple year-end lists in 2021. Our review hailed it as a “politically and culturally driven, funky, proud, and multi-layered” record, adding that Kofi Owusu-Ansah, the young talent behind the music, had “curated a fluid lineup of players and songs to overturn boundaries.” Our review’s headline really said it all: “Genesis Owusu’s Smiling with No Teeth is the making of a music giant.”
NME also loved the album. “The Canberran artist defies the conventions of Australian hip-hop, personalising jazz-funk, punk and folk on his debut,” the publication wrote, going further to praise it as a “transcendent conceptual opus” in a four-star review.
It’s a rare feat to achieve cultural and cool capital alongside commercial success, but, from the very opening moments of Smiling with No Teeth, Owusu never sounded like any ordinary artist. —Conor Lochrie