{"id":87012,"date":"2025-08-22T08:03:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-22T08:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/87012\/"},"modified":"2025-08-22T08:03:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T08:03:12","slug":"tash-sultana-terra-firma-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/87012\/","title":{"rendered":"Tash Sultana, ‘Terra Firma’ (2021)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now this is how you do a debut album \u2014 loud, confident, and wonderfully chaotic.<\/p>\n

Genesis Owusu\u2019s first album didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s debut won Best Record in a \u00a0tough category featuring heavyweights like Amy Shark, Crowded House, and Tash Sultana.<\/p>\n

Purportedly a hip-hop album, Smiling with No Teeth found Owusu journeying dizzyingly through jazz, rap, and soul, whatever genre he fancied exploring.<\/p>\n

Critics lapped up Owusu\u2019s album\u2019s diversity, with it appearing on multiple year-end lists in 2021. Our review<\/a> hailed it as a \u201cpolitically and culturally driven, funky, proud, and multi-layered\u201d record, adding that Kofi Owusu-Ansah, the young talent behind the music, had \u201ccurated\u00a0a fluid lineup of players and songs to overturn boundaries.\u201d Our review\u2019s headline really said it all: \u201cGenesis Owusu\u2019s Smiling with No Teeth is the making of a music giant.\u201d<\/p>\n

NME also loved the album. \u201cThe Canberran artist defies the conventions of Australian hip-hop, personalising jazz-funk, punk and folk on his debut,\u201d the publication wrote, going further to praise it as a \u00a0\u201ctranscendent conceptual opus\u201d in a four-star review.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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. \u2014Conor Lochrie<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Now this is how you do a debut album \u2014 loud, confident, and wonderfully chaotic. Genesis Owusu\u2019s first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":87013,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,136],"class_list":["post-87012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87012\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}